Crypto Investment Platform Mudrex Secures $6.5 Mn; Plans Global Expansion

Bengaluru and San Francisco-based Mudrex, a crypto investing platform has raised $6.5 Mn in a Pre-Series A round from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Bolt by QED Investors. The round follows the startup’s $2.5 Mn seed fundraise from Nexus Venture Partners, Village Global, Kunal Shah, among others.

The funding will help Mudrex accelerate user acquisition, licensing and expansion across India, the US, Europe and Latin America.

Founded in 2018 by Edul Patel, Rohit Goyal, Alankar Saxena, and Prince Arora, Mudrex seeks to simplify crypto investments for retail investors. It packages crypto tokens in a way that is similar to existing investment products akin to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.

It further allows direct conversion of local currency to crypto, aids global liquidity and a secure wallet thus, making crypto investing easy. Its flagship product, Coin Sets, launched in October 2021, is a mutual-fund-like crypto investment product aimed at retail investors.

Coin Sets are ‘baskets’ containing different crypto tokens that all fall under a particular category or theme. For example, the ‘DeFi 10’ Coin Set has the top ten DeFi tokens and the ‘NFT’ Coin Set is a basket of the top six NFT projects. Just like mutual funds are managed by professional money managers, Coin Sets are managed by Mudrex’s experts. It has a month-on-month retention rate of more than 90%.

Concerns about stability, risks and security are some of the biggest hurdles in the way of widespread crypto adoption. Mudrex takes care of allocation, order execution, periodic rebalancing and diversification of these crypto portfolios to manage potential risks.

Further, Mudrex claims to have clocked a 450% user growth in the four months and currently has more than 100K users from over 100 countries.

In a bid to diversify, many crypto exchanges and startups have introduced lending and investment products beyond their core offerings in the last few months.

For example, Ahmedabad-based crypto exchange platform ZebPay launched crypto-based fixed deposits and SIP options. Another Indian crypto exchange, WazirX, launched an NFT marketplace for Indian artists.

The Crypto Taxation Conundrum In India

During the Budget 2022 speech, addressing a slew of confusions around crypto taxation, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has proposed a 30% tax on income from digital assets including crypto and NFTs.

So far, here’s what is proposed:

Alongside, the government has also proposed to launch its much anticipated sovereign-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) or ‘digital rupee’ in 2022-2023. The future of CBDC in India has so far been a bit ambiguous. How the RBI would launch it remained a puzzle for a long time with no clear roadmap in sight.

According to the finance secretary, TV Somanathan, the definition of ‘cryptocurrencies’ will include the legalisation of the RBI-backed digital currency, while excluding all other digital currencies.

According to many crypto experts and enthusiasts, 30% tax is levied on gambling, and the industry is not happy with comparing the likeness of crypto trading to gambling.