young investors prefer bitcoin to gold
“The elders in my family told me not to throw my money away,” said Daga, who runs a food business near New Delhi.
But the 33-year-old hasn’t regretted her decision — bitcoin’s value has increased 15 times since then — and she continues to invest as much as 10% of her savings in cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ethereum.
“I find stock markets boring,” she told CNN Business, adding that she enjoys the “thrill” and “recklessness” that comes with investing in volatile currencies.
She is not the only one.
India has seen a huge boom in cryptocurrency trading since the start of the pandemic, even though authorities in Asia’s third largest economy have for years expressed concerns about digital currencies, and even flirted with banning them. Entrepreneurs in the industry told CNN Business that the country has the potential to become a crypto superpower, since it is one of the hottest internet markets in the world, with 750 million users, and hundreds of millions more yet to come online for the first time.
India ranked second behind only Vietnam last year in a list of countries seeing the fastest growth in cryptocurrency adoption, according to a report published in October by blockchain data platform Chainalysis.
While the government does not keep estimates of how many people trade cryptocurrencies, industry experts have suggested that the country may now have more than 20 million crypto investors.
The growth is driven by younger investors — mostly under the age of 35 — and many of them are coming from smaller cities and towns, founders of two of India’s biggest crypto exchanges told CNN Business.
According to Sumit Gupta, CEO and co-founder of exchange CoinDCX, many Indian millennials have started “their investing journey with crypto.”
While 20 years ago, their parents chose to invest in gold, these youngsters “are more interested in having bitcoin as part of their portfolio,” Gupta told CNN Business, referring to the fact that traditionally Indians chose to park their money in gold or savings accounts.
Buying gold is both an investment and a cultural habit in India, which is one of the largest markets for the precious metal, according to the World Gold Council. It also considered auspicious by Hindus and Jains, and plays a fundamental role in many religious ceremonies.
Mumbai-based CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn last year, achieving a valuation of $1.1 billion after raising money from investors such as Coinbase Ventures and B Capital Group. The company says 70% of its 10 million users are between the age of 18 and 34.
