The financial crisis of 2008 was one of the biggest factors that led to rise of Bitcoin; the most popular decentralized digital currency, to combat major recessions in the future. It was an alternate currency that people could trust during a financial crisis and was designed to function without any intervention from central authorities.
The pandemic in 2020 wreaked havoc across the world, the effects of which were felt by the global economy. This caused several commodities and assets to start losing their value and led to people to look for alternate assets to invest in. Owing to the fact that the cryptocurrency market was almost immune to the Coronavirus, this became one of those assets that people trusted, especially in India.
The cryptocurrency market in India grew from 6 million users in March 2020, to 17 million users in March 2021 and a staggering figure of almost 90 million users as of March 2022. That’s a YoY growth of 421% from 2021 to 2022. This means that there were almost 90 million users who used a cryptocurrency exchange or trading platform in the month of March 2022 alone. This number could be higher if you take into account the users who access foreign cryptocurrency trading platforms over VPN.
Users spent over 1.7 billion minutes on these platforms in the month of March 2021, which was a growth of 1058% over the previous year’s numbers of 149 million. This increased further to 6.1 billion minutes in March 2022.
Crypto Market in India (Million UVs)
Minutes (Million)
Growth UV
Growth Minutes
Mar '20
6027
149
Mar '21
17116
1725
184%
1058%
Mar '22
89226
6121
421%
255%
Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Audience Duplication, Custom List of Cryptocurrency Platforms, March 2022, India.
As of March 2022, COINDCX stood as the largest Cryptocurrency trading/exchange platform in India with over 40 million users, followed WazirX and COINSWITCH with 31.7 million and 30.1 million users respectively. Binance is another platform that attracted about 27.6 million users. The below graph shows the growth of the top 5 platforms in this space over the past 12 months.
The growth of the cryptocurrency market in India was accelerated by several factors including COINDCX’s launch of its new user friendly app, ad campaigns targeting Gen-Z users to invest in cryptocurrencies, the BITCOIN bull run in late 2021, among many others. The listing of Shiba Inu coin on WazirX in April 2021 also helped.