India is home to the largest population of digital currency owners, with one study finding there are over 100 million owners. The country is now pivoting away from digital currency speculation and toward the adoption of the underlying blockchain technology. According to Joe Holles De Peyer and Rohan Sharan, the Asian giant is ready for the blockchain revolution.
De Peyer was one of the speakers at the Enterprise Utility Blockchain Summit (EUBS), an event that brought together the Bitcoin SV (BSV) ecosystem and the Indian developer community. Speaking to CoinGeek Backstage host Claire Celdran after the event, the Gate2Chain co-founder stated that he believes India could be the global hub for blockchain.
“On a development level, it’s amazing. There’s this thirst for building useful applications, which is unheard of in the crypto world. Investors, government officials, and academics; they are all focused on this vision of utility. It’s great for the BSV mentality,” he noted.
De Peyer pointed out that while it’s home to 100 million digital asset owners, India has been cracking down on the industry. Regulators in the country are looking beyond speculation, “and so our whole narrative for BSV fits very well.”
Rohan Sharan, the founder of TimeChain Labs, concurs. Sharan, an organizer of EUBS, told CoinGeek Backstage that blockchain adoption is picking up in India.
“Blockchain technology in India is getting very popular. Big banks are doing pilot projects with blockchain. We also have the national blockchain strategy issued by the government.”
Sharan believes BSV is the only blockchain network that can deliver in India, a country with over 1.4 billion people. India needs an enterprise blockchain that can scale at low fees.
“BSV scales to more than 100,000 transactions a second, solving the major problem that people have with blockchain. Most people, including in India, think that blockchain doesn’t scale, yet that’s what enterprises and the government are looking for.”
According to Sharan, Polygon is India’s most predominant blockchain network, owing largely to its founders being from the country. However, Polygon lags behind BSV and “is still trying to solve some of the problems that Bitcoin SV has already solved.”
At EUBS, many attendees learned about BSV for the first time, and according to Sharan, most were impressed. The TimeChain Labs founder believes such events are critical in creating awareness about Satoshi’s vision and debunking the myths that most people have held, such as “BTC is Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin can’t scale.”
Next up, Sharan is organizing the Global Blockchain Investment Summit, which will focus on “capital accumulation to build the metanet economy on the blockchain.”
The future is on the blockchain
Within the next five years, there will be a lot of blockchain projects in India, De Peyer and Sharan believe. For De Peyer, the big catalyst will be the development of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). India has expressed interest in a digital rupee, although the project is still in its infancy.
BSV has all it takes to anchor the digital rupee, De Peyer believes. The Gate2Chain founder revealed he is in talks with the Reserve Bank of India to introduce the cemtral bank to “show them what’s possible on BSV.”
Gate2Chain is also working to provide Indian developers with all the tools they need to build on Bitcoin.
For Sharan, one of the key areas of focus is fiat onramps that enable Indians to easily interact with Bitcoin. Through TimeChain Labs, Sharan recently launched BitRupi, the fiat gateway to metanet applications. As he told CoinGeek Backstage, it’s quite a challenge for Indians to access BSV on mainstream exchanges.
“We look forward to a big ecosystem forming in India for Bitcoin SV and having a big impact on using the ledger and having a lot of transactions being generated from India,” he concluded.
Watch: BSV Stories – Episode 8: India jumps on board the blockchain train
New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
