Coinbase To Accelerate India Operations By Expanding Team

With India showing increasing interest in crypto in recent years, US-based Coinbase is set to strengthen its India presence. The company’s India head and VP, engineering Pankaj Gupta in a series of tweets announced its India expansion plans.

“We have big plans for our new Coinbase India tech hub to have a global impact (stay tuned for more details shortly). It’s important to us that all our employees deeply understand the products and services that they are helping us deliver.” – Pankaj Gupta, VP, Coinbase

As part of its welcome kit, the company is also offering a one-time $1000 in crypto in the Coinbase accounts of new hires. The company expects that new hires will leverage this offering to learn about crypto by doing and using the product, and will use this knowledge to help Coinbase build the next generation of great products around the world, Gupta added.

In April, this year, Coinbase had appointed Pankaj Gupta to develop its upcoming India development centre, right from the scratch. Gupta was earlier with Google as its senior director of engineering, Google Pay.

The company has currently listed around 19 positions as India openings in designs, engineering, products and HR.

Having debuted as a public company at a valuation of $100 Bn in April, this year, Coinbase shares are back to its initial reference point i.e. from $381 per share to $250 per share. Founded in 2012, Coinbase is currently selling its products and services in more than 100 countries. “We need to move from shipping products that cater only to the US (or UK/EU) to shipping products that work globally. This will increase the number of people who have access to our products and further our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world,” says Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase.

Coinbase Plans To Build Apple Like Crypto App Store

Armstrong in his latest blog has now announced plans to build a crypto store at Coinbase. Drawing an analogy with Apple Appstore, Armstrong writes, “Apple didn’t attempt to build every app for the iPhone, it empowered developers and gave mobile users an easy way to access new innovative apps. We need to do the same in crypto. There is now 10s of billions of dollars of economic activity running on Apps, and a new trend coming out every three months. We’ll work to give our users easy access to all of this from the main Coinbase product.”

The Indian crypto market which has so far been limited to crypto exchanges has recently witnessed a huge diversification in terms of crypto-related products and offerings. While the regulations and legality regarding crypto still fall in grey area, numerous startups such as Vauld, WazirX, Zebpay and CoinDCX have diversified their products. While WazirX launched the NFT marketplace, Zebpay, Vauld and CoinDCX have come up with lending products.

With Coinbase strengthening its India team and launching an app store is expected to accelerate and deepen the growth of crypto products and services in India.