Indian Crypto Exchange Wazirx Taking Auto-Matching P2P Services Global

Cryptocurrency exchange Wazirx is expanding globally. “While India has a banking ban,” the CEO of the exchange told news.Bitcoin.com, “we realized there’s banking trouble in a lot more countries.” Over 40 cryptocurrencies will be available to all major countries, with the exchange’s auto-matching P2P services to launch one country at a time based on user demand.

Also read: Indian Government Confirms Cryptocurrency Regulation in Final Stages

Wazirx Going Global

Wazirx has announced its plans to expand to international markets. CEO Nischal Shetty told news.Bitcoin.com on Sunday:

We’ll be making our crypto-to-crypto markets available globally within the next week … All the 40+ crypto currently available on Wazirx will be available to all the major countries.

As for its peer-to-peer (P2P) services, Wazirx plans to launch “one country at a time based on demand from the users of specific countries,” Shetty clarified. “Based on user signups, we’ll launch P2P services for the countries with [the] highest demand and expand to more countries accordingly.”

The CEO detailed that “non-Indian users will have to provide their identity proof and also verify their mobile numbers” in order to “ensure that P2P services adhere to KYC and AML laws of the countries we launch in.”

Auto-Matching Engine

Wazirx celebrated its one-year anniversary on March 7. The exchange revealed at the time that over 30 percent of its P2P transactions are done in under five minutes, with an average completion time of 19.4 minutes. Furthermore, there have been “0% fraud cases” on its platform, the exchange claims, noting that only 2 percent of its P2P transactions “go into dispute and we’re constantly working on reducing this further.”

Shetty explained to news.Bitcoin.com:

Wazirx P2P is an auto-matching engine which automatically matches your P2P buy/sell order.

He elaborated that “Unlike local classifieds type of website for P2P,” orders are automatically matched, emphasizing that “It’s completely automated and the experience is just like a regular trading experience.”

Combating Banking Problems

Sharing the reasons for Wazirx’s international expansion, the CEO described:

While India has a banking ban, on researching we realized there’s banking trouble in a lot more countries.

India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), issued a circular in April last year banning banks from providing services to crypto exchanges. To combat this banking restriction, Wazirx and several other local exchanges launched exchange-escrowed P2P services to enable customers to continue to withdraw INR.

“Presently, many users in a lot of countries are stuck with bad local exchanges that have high fees and high premiums on crypto,” Shetty asserted. “We’ve seen banking issues resulting in account freezes and causing trouble to users in many countries,” he continued, noting that “P2P is safer as we’ll never hold the users’ fiat in our own bank accounts.”

What do you think of Wazirx expanding globally? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.