Published on March 5, 2020
In Geek Fusion

How Lifting Crypto Ban In India Will Accelerate Jobs And Blockchain Startups

Vishal Chawla

In this article, we take a look at how crypto legalisation can boost the blockchain market growth in India in the context of jobs and startups.

We know that the Supreme Court of India on March 4, 2020, cancelled an order by the Reserve Bank of India which had banned banks from supporting cryptocurrency activity in 2018. The apex court in fact called RBI’s move “unconstitutional”, which is certainly great news for crypto professionals in India.

But what does it mean for this sector in India? While crypto trading and INR to crypto banking support has already been reinitiated by exchanges, there is a lot more that will come back to life for India’s blockchain investors and innovators. In this article, we take a look at how crypto legalisation can boost the blockchain market growth in India in the context of jobs and startups.

Creating More Blockchain Jobs For India

According to a Linked Report titled Emerging Jobs: Blockchain Engineer is the leading job role, which companies are looking for. Here, there is a huge demand for Solidity developers. Solidity is the main programming language used in smart programming contracts, decentralised applications (Dapps), and decentralised finance (Defi) platforms in the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem.

As long as the crypto ecosystem was hampered in India, the blockchain skills market including Solidity developers came to almost a null. This is because learning Ethereum means a developer (or a company) would have to dabble in a cryptocurrency called Ether (ETH), which was hard to buy and exchange. Each transaction programmed on the Ethereum blockchain needs a small amount of ETH cryptocurrency as it is the fuel of the network. Now that the ban has been lifted, the market access to Ethereum would increase helping both startups and developers.

The lifting of the crypto ban is also expected to give a boost to multiple job roles in India such as entrepreneurs, cryptoanalysts, crypto economists, mining hardware manufacturers and maintainers, hardware wallet traders, content creators, developers, crypto legal experts, crypto tax experts, and accountants. This according to some can potentially create thousands of jobs in the coming years.

Why Startups Ecosystem Will Get A Boost

Now, that the ban on crypto activity and exchange has been lifted, this is an opportunity for many startups to begin innovating in public blockchains, cryptocurrency and decentralised applications by building new cryptographic technologies and payment systems.

Earlier, there was a lot of hesitance in Indian startup space across both entrepreneurs and investors to invest time and money in public blockchains such as Ethereum or Bitcoin. This is also expected to be relieved. WazirX’s cofounder Nischal Shetty also said the company would begin to start investing in the Indian market this year.

Stopping The Crypto Brain Drain

A number of crypto professionals and entrepreneurs had in fact moved to places like Singapore, Europe and the USA to register their companies or work as developers as a blanket ban on crypto. The crypto ecosystem had been flourishing in Singapore, for example, helping it become a beneficiary of neo-banking and crypto banking services, which are cutting edge innovation in the financial and banking sector. After the quashing of the crypto ban, there is a lot of activity which may be shifted back to India given India is a major fintech destination.

Many of the stakeholders in India’s blockchain ecosystem — which includes developers, service providers, and other cryptocurrency-related firms shifted to nations with more friendly jurisdictions like Singapore, Switzerland, Japan, and, in particular, Estonia. Now, that the crypto blanker banket has been lifted, Zebpay, one India’s largest crypto exchanges in the past, has made a return to India, after having shifted its headquarters to Singapore in late 2018.