Last week, there were reports about a new bill in India. According to the bill, people who in some way deal with cryptocurrencies risk a prison sentence of up to ten years.
The Swedish-owned crypto exchange Nova has a total of around 40,000 users. About 10,000 of them are people living in India.
“If it gets passed, it is of course tedious. Then the question is whether a country would ban cryptocurrencies in this way. It feels very absurd”, says Oskar Söderström, CEO of Goobit Group, which owns both Nova and the Swedish crypto exchange BTCX.
Prepared for the worst
According to Oskar Söderström, Nova takes the new Indian bill very seriously and plans for the possibility of it becoming a reality, although he hopes for the opposite.
“We are prepared for the worst, but hope for the best. I don’t think it will be passed. Not in its full form in any case, that you get ten years in prison because you have traded with cryptocurrencies, says Oskar Söderström to Trijo News.
An important target group
Since around 25 percent of Nova’s users come from India, the country is an important market for the crypto exchange.
However, Oskar Söderström tones down that the consequences for Nova would be serious. Instead, he points out that the exchange recently had an influx of new customers from other parts of the world.
Among other things, Nova is currently running a campaign to pick up users from the hacked crypto exchange Cryptopia. This is done by listing coins from there to get the users to tag along.
“India is definitely an important target group for us, but it is not where we grow the most. They are not so representative in regards to our turnover. We have much higher turnover on other users, says Oskar Söderström.
