The government in its legislative agenda listed the Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021 for introduction in the upcoming Winter Session of the Parliament.
The Bill for the regulation of digital coins “seeks to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India, however, it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology and its uses,” as per the description of the listed item.
This created a panic leading many to speculate that the government plans to ban anyone from mining, buying, generating, holding, issuing, selling, transfer or dealing in cryptocurrency. Industry insiders are of the view that the government only seeks to regulate such digital assets instead of an outright ban.
The cryptocurrency industry has seen a huge boom in the past few years in India with over $10 billion in investments till November 2021 and mushrooming of many trading platforms and cryptocurrency exchanges. The headcount at such companies has increased by 10 times in the last year alone. For example, trading platform Coinswitch Kuber increased its employee base from 25 to 380 during the last year while at WazirX, it is up from 30 to over 300 in the same period. Another trading platform Unocoin hired over 30 blockchain engineers in the last one year.
Given massive prospects for scaling up and a bull run in cryptocurrencies, these firms had further plans to expand operations and hire much more. Most of these companies had plans to increase hiring for technical, marketing & sales and other supporting roles by the end of the financial year. Most hirings were slated to occur in technical roles pertaining to blockchain and cybersecurity and those well versed in Java and Ruby languages. Coinswitch Kuber had plans to increase strength to over 500 employees by the end of the year.
Shekhar Garisa, President, Emerging Businesses & Chief Strategy Officer at Quess Corp Limited who oversees India business of job portal Monster.com, told ET Now that 60 employers have listed over 5,000 jobs in such roles but talent supply is less than demand in the job market right now.
While the cryptocurrency industry continues to thrive globally, it faces a big question mark over its survival here in India. There is speculation that trading platforms will be forced to shift shop to Dubai and Singapore if it causes an existential crisis in India.
