Despite the regulatory uncertainty around cryptocurrencies in India, the country has a vibrant ecosystem. There are some interesting companies to watch out for, right from crypto exchanges that aim to let users easily buy and sell digital currencies to startups that are leveraging the power of blockchain to serve a global audience. And that’s what we’d be focusing on today in this piece.
Polygon
Formerly MATIC network, Polygon has been in the news a lot this year. Be it the fact that its token price has seen a significant leap or the fact that the billionaire Mark Cuban has invested in it. Started at the end of 2017, Polygon is a layer-2 scaling solution. It started with Ethereum, but today, it can be used with other blockchains to make transactions cheaper and faster. Developers can build on top of Polygon to offer these advantages to users. Its co-founders Sandeep Nailwal (who also started the COVID Crypto Relief Fund initiative), Jaynti Kanani, and Anurag Arjun are based out of India and are already a billionaire (based on their current stakes in Polygon). There’s a fourth co-founder Mihailo Bjelic, who’s Serbian.
WazirX
Perhaps the most successful crypto company in India (considering it’s already been acquired by Binance), WazirX has had an inspiring journey. Started in 2018, WazirX aimed at making it extremely easy to buy and sell cryptos. And despite the ban by the Reserve Bank of India, WazirX became a P2P marketplace facilitating crypto transactions. The exchange token WRX has also continued to grow well. Today, the exchange has ~7 million users and is continuing to launch new initiatives.
It recently launched an NFT marketplace to ride the popularity trend.
CoinDCX
CoinDCX is a popular crypto exchange and also India’s first unicorn in this space. It recently raised $90 million in Series C funding from leading investors like B Capital Group, Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, and more. It’s currently valued at $1.1 billion and was founded just three years ago. It has over 3.5 million users at the moment and is aiming to create more awareness about crypto. CoinDCX will also be partnering with fintech startups.
It’ll be launching CoinDCX Prime to helping high net worth individuals (HNIs) and enterprises invest in the crypto space in the coming future. It’ll also be launching a global trading platform dubbed Cosmex.
Instadapp
Catering to the DeFi (decentralized finance) space, Instadapp helps in maximizing returns in various protocols. It also serves the needs of developers by helping them build various use-cases. Born out of a hackathon in Bengaluru in August 2018, it has already raised $12.4 million in such a short span of time. After the $10 million funding in June this year, it also launched its governance token – INST. Currently, the Instadapp token has a value of $8.66. What’s impressive is the fact that Instadapp is currently the third most used DeFi app as per DefiPulse.
Covalent
Among the biggest tenets of cryptocurrencies is that it has a rich data with everything stored on the blockchain. However, it’s not easy to make sense of all this data. Enter Covalent, which aims to bring visibility to all these blockchain data points. It provides a unified API that integrates with leading blockchain like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Polkadot, and more. It also has a staking and governance token dubbed Covalent Query Token (CQT), which is trading on leading exchanges at $1.33. Covalent cofounders Ganesh Swamy and Levi Aul have an ambitious goal of becoming the Google of blockchain.