Is bitcoin usage growing in India? You bet! Zeb IT Services Pvt Ltd, a bitcoin app-based exchange headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, has announced that the company’s app, Zebpay, has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Android and iOS app stores.
The Zebpay app was launched in July of 2015 and the newly released figures are evidence of the swelling interest in digital currencies among Indians.
While most digital currency exchanges require users to be familiar with the mechanics of sending and receiving bitcoin payments - which can be a daunting task for newcomers and non-techies - Zebpay’s mobile wallet ties the user’s bitcoin to their email address, thus removing bitcoin’s very long alphanumeric addresses from the user experience.
“Zebpay removes all friction for a first time bitcoiner. You can buy and sell bitcoins from the app itself. Also, your bitcoins are linked with your mobile number so you don’t have to worry about bitcoin addresses and wallet backups.”
And this particular functionality has contributed a great deal to the success Zebpay is seeing in India. The press release states that 20,000 new users are signing up every month to use the Zebpay mobile bitcoin exchange. Mahin Gupta, co-founder and CTO of Zebpay, is expecting roughly 350,000 downloads by the end of the year, “We are on a mission to spread bitcoins in India. We believe it has a potential to bring technological disruption in financial infrastructure,” he adds.
The mobile app has also been received quite well on iTunes and Google Play, with ratings of 4+ and 4.3 respectively. Just one year after launching, Zebpay revenues for the month of June crossed 250,000,000 Indian rupees ($3,734,670).
Zebpay’s success comes at a time of rapid growth for the Indian telecom industry. Data released by the International Data Corporation revealed that the Indian smartphone market recorded a 17% growth in the second quarter of 2016. And according to the recent global Ericsson Mobility Report, there were 21 million new mobile subscriptions in India during the first quarter of 2016, compared to only 3 million in the United States.
