In a quarterly earning’s call, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong has said that the company’s reason for disabling UPI services for Indians was “informal pressure” from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
“So a few days after launching, we ended up disabling UPI because of some informal pressure from the Reserve Bank of India, which is kind of the Treasury equivalent there,” he said.
He also mentions how crypto is not banned in India due to the Supreme Court ruling of 2020. However, he recognizes the fact that “there are elements in the government there, including at the Reserve Bank of India, who don’t seem to be as positive on it.”
He goes on to explain that the Indian Government is imposing something called a “shadow ban”, which means that the government is applying pressure behind the scenes “to try to disable some of these payments, which might be going through UPI.”
Read Also: Indian Banks Demand NPCI to Clarify UPI use for Crypto
The CEO concludes the conversation on India by saying that even though the RBI’s actions might be in violation of the Supreme Court ruling, the company intends to work with the RBI and focus on relaunching.
Coinbase is an American crypto exchange platform which was launched in India in April of this year. The platform was however forced to suspend its UPI services just 3 days after the launch. It was at this earning’s call that the reason for suspension of the UPI services was clarified.
In related news, at the same quarterly meeting it was observed and discussed that Coinbase missed its quarterly projected trading volume, part of the reason could be the suspension of UPI services in India.
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