Leading US crypto exchange Coinbase has revealed that it is “establishing a business presence in India,” despite the fact that the government is in talks about possibly banning cryptocurrencies.
In a blog post from today, Coinbase mentioned that it had plans to house “some IT services, including engineering, software development, and customer support operations in India,” highlighting the Indian “huge pool of world-class engineering talent.”
“India has long been known as a hub for engineering and technology innovation, and we look forward to finding that world-class talent to help the Coinbase group develop new ways for our customers to interact with the crypto-economy.”
The announcement was made, but on Coinbase’s careers portal, no job positions have been posted yet that would be specific to India. Even a search on the website for the word “India” didn’t bring any results.
The blog post also mentioned that the company is actively hiring in several countries from around the globe, including Canada, the UK, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines, in order to expand the geographic diversity of the “remote-first” workforce.
The news is rather surprising, considering the fact that the crypto sector in India finds itself in uncertain waters, as it is rumored the country plans a bill to criminalize the “possession, issuance, mining, trading, and transferring crypto-assets.” Then again, Nirmala Sitharaman, the Minister of Finance of India, declared two weeks ago that the government wasn’t “shutting all options off” for the crypto industry.
“We will allow certain windows for people [to] use so that experiments on the blockchain, Bitcoins or cryptocurrency […] will have that [option] available for them,” she revealed.
Sitharaman also mentioned that the Reserve Bank of India had plans to announce its CBDC soon, which may imply that the crypto ban could have something to do with it.