India Tops 100 Million Bitcoiners?

The Times of India boasts their country is top of the crypto world, ranking first above the United States or Europe.

“Indian start-ups in the crypto space have received 73% more funding in the first six months of calendar 2021 compared to the whole of 2020… states in India are emerging as crypto tech adopters,” they cheer.

The number is huge, with the paper citing BrokerChooser for it. That in turn cites TripleA, which appears to be into payments. That in turn cites a 2020 survey by Statista as well as a report by Hootsuite of that year.

Do we believe it? Well, it generally sounds like a reasonable estimate with them suggesting there are 300 million cryptonians globally, but they exclude China so for some specific countries it may be inflated.

This is the first time we see such a thorough breakdown by country, with the numbers generally looking within a reasonable ballpark. We’d have UK perhaps a bit higher, maybe 5 million. Netherlands is probably one million. Turkey maybe 4 million. Saudi Arabia does surprise with just how many there are, 150,000 in UAE, but neither is an unreasonable estimate, just interesting.

USA sounds about right at 27 million, maybe a bit higher. Europe as a whole is at 38 million, including Russia. Africa at 32 million. Ukraine sounds a lot at 5.5 million, but considering they’re Europeans in a frozen conflict, it doesn’t sound unreasonable.

In fact there isn’t a country we can point to and say that’s out of line as an estimate, but for India it sounds a bit too much. We’d feel more comfortable with 50 million as a number. Even that sounds huge.

The number itself however is less important than what it suggests. A trend is on and that trend appears to be unstopabble.

“Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber valued at $1.9 bln after fund raise,” Reuters reported earlier this month.

“Hyderabad: A Cryptocurrency exchange platform named Bitsz was launched in the city, bringing joy to crypto fans,” says Siasat Daily.

“I downloaded the code and compiled and ran it on my machine. After waiting for the chain to synchronize overnight without progress, I abandoned the toy project, got back into finishing my grad school and job hunting,” says Arvinder Singh from India’s region of Panjab while retelling the story of how he missed the opportunity in 2010 to launch bitcoin QR payments.

That’s just a snapshot of what the Indian Supreme Court decision in 2020 has unleashed as it standing up to to the central bank’s blockade on cryptos proved the country has a rule of law, and it also showed there’s a very effective crypto community there.

Hyderabad in particular is rising as a crypto center of sorts, with some Indian coders leading their own global crypto projects, especially in defi.

But India is part of a bigger story that includes Brazil and Turkey andAfrica. It doesn’t feel like it has an outsized impact, despite their huge numbers, and that may be because for them it’s just the beginning where cryptos are concerned, it’s 2014.

It’s the second wave of awareness there, the first starting in 2018, with it probably being just now when things start to get built.

Yet this shows just how global crypto truly is, with a new class of sorts rising across the world and their mission is to improve much of it through code.

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