The banking company, called Unicas, aims to expand to 100 branches by next year
Cashaa, a fintech firm based in the United Kingdom, is collaborating with India’s United Multistate Credit Cooperative Society to launch Unicase, a crypto – centric banking company. The initial plans include the opening of 34 branches in Northern India, with additional projects for expansion to 100 branches by next year.
Since India’s economy is primarily driven by savings, Unicas is also working on offering crypto saving accounts that pay interest on deposited cryptocurrency. This has the potential to act as a bridge for cooperative credit societies in India to interact with the crypto market.
As a whole, the cryptocurrency industry in India has experienced massive growth in both volumes and new clients ever since the country’s Supreme Court repealed a two – year ban that prevented banks from offering their services to cryptocurrency exchanges in March 2020. The founder of Indian crypto exchange WazirX, Nischal Shetty, told Cointelegraph that this growth was made possible through a combination of the repeal and the pandemic.
“The Indian crypto ecosystem has been growing tremendously since the Supreme Court lifted the banking ban on crypto in India. […] The positive verdict was immediately followed by a lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This period has also given people more time at hand to read about crypto and participate in it.”
Ashu Swami, the Chief Technology Officer of the New York based crypto liquidity and solutions provider, Apifiny, believes that this growth is caused by the increasing evidence that Bitcoin (BTC) is indeed a safe haven and will also contribute towards the ease of conducting inward remittances to the country with cryptocurrencies.
Swami pointed out that other assets have their own unique disadvantages that can be answered by the adoption of cryptocurrencies.
“The INR has been highly volatile, having depreciated over 80% vs. the USD in the last decade. Gold is very hard to trade and has high transaction costs; real – estate has been in a slump since the demonetisation of 2016, and the stocks are at record high valuations, and many believe they are due for a correction any time now”, he explained.
This environment has funnelled users into cryptocurrencies, and all of the major international crypto exchanges have reported a traffic increase between five to ten times from users in India this year.
Local crypto exchanges in the country have also reported a tenfold increase in registrations since the repeal of the ban, which is two and a half times the global average of 400% year over year growth.