8 highlights
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This small town of barely 30,000 inhabitants has a new obsession: cryptocurrency. Everyone from teens to senior citizens are hooked on it, tells me 34-year-old Mustafa, who has been living here for a few years now.
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Mustafa shoulders the income of not just himself but at least seven others whose crypto portfolios he manages on a daily basis. On average, he ends up moving more than Rs 1 lakh onto exchanges every single day.
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WazirX, one of India’s early cryptocurrency exchanges, claims that 55% of users on its platform in 2021 came from these areas.
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Whether it’s a simple trip around to Indore or Delhi, Mustafa and his friends have completely stopped using conventional payment methods such as UPI. To settle their petty bills between themselves, they resort to using Tether, which is a stablecoin or cryptocurrency pegged at $1.
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For many in small-town India, the fact that most of the instructions to invest are in English is a massive hurdle. Which is why WhatsApp groups have emerged as a lifeline for most in these towns.
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“Even the disclaimers displayed on these exchanges are useless, most of them are in English and for those who can’t understand it, what is the point?”
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Data from blockchain tracking firm Chainalysis found that Indians visited crypto scam websites more than 17.8 million times in 2020 and 9.6 million times in 2021.
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“These schemes will continue to be alive as long as there are fresh chickens, and given how popular cryptocurrencies are they will be, without regulation, those with good intentions will always be outnumbered by these projects,”