Coinbase Suspends Services in India Due to “Informal Pressure” From Central Bank

Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has ended its operations in India just a few days after launching on April 7.

Elaborating on the reasons why, CEO Brian Armstrong pointed to “informal pressure” from the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Speaking during his company’s Q1 earnings call on Tuesday, Armstrong  said:

“There’s a lot of interest in crypto amongst the people there in India. So we had an integration with what’s called UPI. And this was a great example of just our international strategy.”

He added:

“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.”

The Coinbase boss continued:

“And India is a unique market, in the sense that the supreme court has ruled that they can’t ban crypto, but there are elements in the government there, including at Reserve Bank of India, who don’t seem to be as positive on it.”

Armstrong noted that what the RBI is effectively doing is referred to by the media as “shadow banning,” elaborating:

“Basically, they’re applying soft pressure behind the scenes to try to disable some of these payments, which might be going through UPI.

I guess we have a concern that they may be actually in violation of the supreme court ruling, which would be interesting to find out if it were to go there.”

The exchange is working hard to make sure it can resume operations in the country as soon as possible. Armstrong said:

“But I think our preference is really just to work with them and focus on relaunching. I think there’s a number of paths that we have to relaunch with other payment methods there. And that’s the default path going forward.

My hope is that we will be live back in India in relatively short order, along with a number of other countries, where we’re pursuing international expansion similarly.”