WazirX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges serving Indian customers, crashed due to high traffic. The platform recorded a turnover of over $ 270 million in 24 hours, before the site crashed. It is the first time that WazirX, founded in 2018 and taken over by Binance in 2019, has experienced such high trading volume.
And the next day the trades increased!
As the news spread across the crypto community on Sunday April 4, and the platform continued to experience outages and downtime, another record was broken the next day when $ 350 million worth of trades were recorded.
WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty was quoted by Mint: “We have activated scaling systems, which start creating new server instances to accommodate new users. To create new servers, our scaling system relies on several components, one of which is provided by a third-party service provider. Due to such unprecedented and high traffic, we have reached an internal speed limit with our service provider, which has led to the failure to create new servers and the suffocation of our existing servers ”.
Shetty says his cryptocurrency exchange platform is on track to generate $ 1 billion in exchanges every day by the end of this year, provided the proposed ban on cryptocurrencies in India doesn't become a reality. If WazirX reaches this milestone, it will be India's first "crypto unicorn".
Why India wants to ban cryptocurrencies
Previously, Reuters reported that India's central government would consider banning cryptocurrencies in the country and fining miners. However, the government refrained from taking a hard stand on the issue.
Rather, it made it mandatory for cryptocurrency holders - companies and individuals - to disclose their holdings, transactions, profits and losses. The move is seen by the industry as a step towards regulating the cryptocurrency market. India is said to have around 10 million people active in cryptocurrency trading and theirs total investment in cryptocurrencies is around 1,5 billion dollars.
The unprecedented rush to WazirX that led to the site crash is a clear indicator that cryptocurrencies have not lost their appeal, despite conflicting rumors from multiple sources, including the government.
Skepticism about the government's stance towards digital currencies stems from an RBI circular dated April 6, 2018, which prevented RBI-regulated banks from offering banking services to any cryptocurrency exchange. However, the Supreme Court of India on March 4, 2020, quashed the RBI circular, paving the way for normal cryptocurrency trading in the country.
