Following news that India has lifted its crypto ban, two digital tokens listed by the Singapore-based Delta derivatives exchange have experienced huge jumps in trading activity among Indian users.
WRX, the native token of the India-based WazirX crypto exchange recently acquired by Binance, is currently up a whopping 60 percent. Meanwhile, MATIC is up around 20 percent, trading at its highest price point since December.
"There has been good interest in WRX and MATIC over the past few days. The volumes have doubled and the number of active traders, in these names, increased 5 fold week-on-week,” Delta Exchange CEO Pankaj Balani told Decrypt.
“The market was long into the event and in some sense expecting a positive judgement from the apex court. Long positions in these names are still intact and we expect these coins to continue rallying over the next few days. A 50%+ up-move in WRX reflects market's expectations of an imminent boom in crypto trading volumes in India," he said.
India’s ban on crypto first took hold in 2018. The ban did not outlaw cryptocurrencies themselves, but instead placed limitations on banks and financial institutions and prevented them from dealing with companies that dealt in digital assets. The Royal Bank of India (RBI) explained at the time that cryptocurrencies were not “real money” as they did not exist in physical form, nor had they garnered government approval.
Several businesses and exchanges were hit hard by the ban including Zebpay, which was one of India’s largest digital trading platforms. The company was gaining as many as 300,000 new customers daily, according to Quartz, but was later forced to close its doors and relocate.
India’s Supreme Court has since ruled that the ban is unconstitutional. Nischal Shetty—founder and chief executive of WazirX—told TechCrunch that this was a “historic day for crypto in India.”
Former e-Toro analyst Mati Greenspan explained in the latest edition of his Quantum Economics newsletter that he has always been certain India would help push crypto adoption further. “[This] could not have come at a more auspicious time,” he said.