Bitcoin enthusiasts in India will soon be able to trade similar cryptocurrencies as a group of engineering pass-outs from IIT and BITS will soon launch an exchange which will make this possible.
The exchange, named Koinex, aims to enable trade in multiple cryptocurrencies with the Indian rupee and has plans to have inter-cryptocurrency trading as well.
Speaking with Moneycontrol, Rahul Raj, co-founder of the company said that Koinex Beta will launch on August 25 and from the first day of operations it will support trade in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple.
At the launch, it will facilitate trade in digital currencies only with INR and has plans to support inter-cryptocurrency trades within two months from the launch.
Raj, who himself got into crypto-trading in early 2017, said as there were not many options in India, he was compelled to trade on global exchanges like Coinbase and Poloniex.
"After realizing the huge gap in terms of the quality delivered by global exchanges and the present Indian exchanges, we decided to build an Indian exchange supporting INR fiat currency and multiple cryptocurrencies, and thus Koinex was conceptualized," he said.
"Koinex offers a highly competitive tiered trade fee schedule for high frequency trading. Crypto-financial instruments and other cryptocurrency products have already been conceptualized and included in the 1 year roadmap," he added.
When asked whether the exchange will support the newly-born bitcoin cash or not, Raj said Koinex will support the longest chain of Bitcoin after monitoring for 20 days.
Bitcoin gained a lot popularity and global acceptance in 2016 and has rallied around 200 percent year-to-date. Riding on the back of bitcoin's success, many similar digital currencies (altcoins) have seen a huge price rally since the start of the year.
Since the start of 2017, the total cryptocurrency market cap has ballooned nearly 500 percent to USD 100 billion from USD 17 billion.
Due to the lack of legal framework around virtual currencies in India, cryptocurrency trading has not flourished in India but soon this might change as the government plans to lay down regulations around businesses based on the technology.
Existing bitcoin exchanges in India like Zebpay and Unocoin also have said that they have plans to introduce altcoin trading but have not given any timeline for the same.