India is one of the most attractive market for Bitcoin based businesses. Thanks to the huge population, mobile phone penetration and huge foreign remittances. Even though it presents itself as an attractive market, the adoption of Bitcoin in India has been slow due to various reasons.
In the recent days, many Bitcoin companies have announced their plans of entering the Indian market. Some of these companies include Bitreserve, Harborly and Coinbase. It will take some time for their presence to be felt. Having said that, we can’t overlook the home-grown Bitcoin companies as well.
India has got few prolific award-winning Bitcoin business ventures. One among them is Zebpay. Zebpay caught the world’s attention when it was selected as the best Bitcoin company at CoinAgenda 2014 held in Las Vegas.
CoinAgenda is one of the kind Bitcoin investor conference held annually in Las Vegas. Zebpay managed to attract a lot of attention due to its unique offering. Unlike other wallets, the wallet allowed users to send or receive Bitcoin by using their phone number. With Zebpay, users don’t have to use a long string of characters to send Bitcoin to someone, but instead they can send it to them like an instant message. The Zebpay wallet address is linked to the user’s phone number and one doesn’t have to know much about bitcoin to transfer them anymore.
Until recently, Zebpay’s services were limited to sending and receiving Bitcoin. Now users can do much more than that on the application. They can now spend their Bitcoin to buy cash vouchers for their favourite e-commerce store. Users can currently buy gift vouchers/cash vouchers for shopping on Amazon and Flipkart – two leading e-commerce players in the region. Soon the company also plans to offer mobile airtime for prepaid customers. To sweeten it a bit further, the company offers these vouchers at discounted prices.
According to one of its founder, Zebpay intends to become the PayTM of the Bitcoin world and they seem to be working in the right direction so far. For those who don’t know what PayTM is – PayTM is a mobile/web wallet service for fiat currency in India. They also have a large e-commerce offering. PayTM allows both peer-to-peer money transfer and offers payment processing service for merchants as well.
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There aren’t many merchants who accept Bitcoin in India. So, Bitcoin use was limited to money transfer until Zebpay launched this offering. Unocoin is another Indian Bitcoin exchange that allows its customers to buy mobile credits and vouchers with Bitcoin.