India’s CoinSwitch crypto exchange fires 44 employees as trading volumes drop

CoinSwitch, an Indian cryptocurrency exchange backed by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, has laid off 44 employees from its customer support team due to a drop in customer queries with falling trading volumes, business news site Moneycontrol reported on Monday.

Fast facts

• CoinSwitch said it is open to welcoming back the employees it fired if trading volumes were to return.
• “Over the last year, many support team members have been absorbed into other functions based on the suitability of their skills for the other roles. We are extending all our support to the impacted employees,” CoinSwitch said in a statement.
• CoinSwitch hasn’t disclosed its exact employee count, but according to its LinkedIn page, it has 518 employees.
• Last week, CoinDCX, a crypto exchange known for being India’s first crypto unicorn, said it laid off 12% of its staff due to the impact of a prolonged bear market and local tax rules. CoinSwitch became India’s second crypto unicorn in October 2021 after a US$260 million Series C round.
• India, the world’s most populous nation, last year imposed a 30% flat tax on all crypto income and later added a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on crypto trades above 10,000 Indian rupees (US$121).
• According to research by Esya Centre, a technology policy think tank in India, the current cryptocurrency tax structure “may lead to a loss of approximately US$1.2 trillion of local exchange trade volume in the next four years”.
• Already, a cumulative trade volume of about US$3.852 billion moved from India’s centralized crypto exchanges to foreign exchanges between February and October 2022, after India introduced strict crypto tax rules on Feb. 1, the report said.

Author profile

Pradipta Mukherjee

Pradipta Mukherjee is a business reporter and has worked for Bloomberg News and Business Standard in India. An MBA and a post-graduate in Economics, Mukherjee focuses on financial markets and corporates. She is a Mary Morgan Hewett award recipient for Women in Journalism. She has also won the Jefferson Fellowship; the Thomson Reuters Foundation fellowship on ‘Social Media and Digital Journalism’ at The Chinese University of Hong Kong; the Kiplinger Fellowship at Ohio University, USA; and most recently, the National Press Foundation’s fellowship on ‘International Trade.’

pradipta.mukherjee@forkast.news

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Yohan Yun

Yohan is an Assignment Editor at Forkast and has worked as an assistant reporter covering stories in Asia for media publications such as Bloomberg BNA and Forbes, on topics related to Korea-US FTA, technology, environment, 2017 tax legislation amendments.

yohan.yun@forkast.news @hyoseopyun Yohan Yun