Exchange-escrowed trading directly between cryptocurrency buyers and sellers is growing in popularity in India following the crypto banking ban imposed by the country’s central bank. One local exchange, in particular, is seeing “tremendous” response from Indian traders for this service as “tens of thousands of new users have signed up” in a month.
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Indians Warming Up to New Solution
Since the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), banned banks from providing fiat service to crypto companies, local cryptocurrency exchanges have come up with solutions for their users to be able to withdraw Indian rupees. One popular solution is exchange-escrowed trading which local exchanges call peer-to-peer (P2P) trading.
Indian crypto exchange Wazirx launched this service about a month ago. CEO Nischal Shetty told news.Bitcoin.com that the response from traders for this service has been “tremendous,” stating:
People love P2P…Everyone had their doubts whether P2P would work or not, the convenience etc…[But now] We’re seeing above 1 trade match every minute happening in P2P…we’re talking about peer-to-peer transactions at a rate of more than 1 per minute.
He further revealed, “tens of thousands of new users have signed up on Wazirx after we introduced P2P. In fact we got more signups in the last 2 weeks than we got in the last 2 months.”
Platforms With Similar Services
The Wazirx P2P system was built “to replicate how a traditional order book in an exchange behaves,” the CEO described. It uses tether (USDT) in transactions. Sellers convert their cryptocurrencies to USDT and sell them for rupees. Buyers convert their rupees into USDT which can be used to trade any cryptocurrencies on the exchange. “Wazirx acts as an escrow
