India: Binance P2P supports Paytm now

The period of altseason has been predicted by many and there has been growing interest visible for crypto. Binance recently added Indian Rupees [INR] on its peer-to-peer trading platform to attract Indian traders but the payment method still posed a problem. On 21 August, Binance added 58 new payment methods, and India’s e-commerce payment system Paytm was among them.

Paytm has over 58 million account holders and is among the largest mobile commerce platform with about 450 million registered users. Indian crypto traders were looking for different payment method and by adding Paytm to its list of payment methods, it seemed like Binance had taken the step in the right direction.

However, exchanges and users need not celebrate too soon. Recently reports stated that Paytm moved to freeze bank accounts of users suspected of crypto trading. According to reports, Paytm was freezing users’ accounts and later communicated the issues to the users. This practice of feezing accounts has been more prevalent among private banks across India.

Reserve Banks of India [RBI] had restricted banks from providing services in crypto assets to users in 2018, but Supre Court of India quashed this circular in March 2020. Despite this, the central bank has not redacted its circular from the website and banks have been holding onto this to flag users’ payments. Recently, HDFC bank too joined the league of banks – Axis and Kotak bank- in cautioning users about the “probable Virtual Currency transactions” reflected in their accounts and stated that the RBI guidelines prohibited such transactions.

As RBI chooses to ignore the Apex court ruling and failed to provide banks with an updated memo, crypto users may find peer-to-peer trades as a good solution. India has been reporting higher peer-to-peer volume, with exchanges like Paxful gaining ground.

Source: UsefulTulips

On 2 August, P2P volume in India hit a yearly high of $1.80 million, following China with $2.110 million. China reported the largest market, however, it was closely followed by India.