Ashish Singhal on CoinSwitch's Web3 Coins, access to 1 lakh tokens, and fixing crypto compliance

CoinSwitch, India's largest crypto trading platform with over two crore users, has launched Web3 Coins, a major step toward democratising decentralised crypto trading in India. In a first, CoinSwitch will provide retail investors access and trade over 1,00,000 crypto tokens, including meme coins, utility tokens, and early-stage innovations, directly in Indian rupee (INR).

Decentralised exchanges have long been home to high-potential, emerging tokens, but they come with barriers like wallet setups, bridges, token swaps, network fees, and a steep learning curve. With Web3 Coins, CoinSwitch aims to solve that. "Earlier, a normal crypto user was confined to the top 250 tokens...Now, they can access over a lakh tokens almost in real time — from meme coins to new tech innovations," said Ashish Singhal, Co-founder, CoinSwitch, in an exclusive interview with Fortune India.

Designed for everyday investors, Web3 Coins integrates the benefits of decentralised trading, while preserving the safety and simplicity associated with centralised platforms. "Having custody of your tokens is great for tech-savvy users...but for most people, we simplify that complexity, from wallet setup to multi-chain transactions, while ensuring safety and regulatory compliance."

To balance decentralisation with user protection, CoinSwitch has built a proprietary TRACE framework that filters out scam or rug-pull tokens before they're listed. "TRACE analyses smart contracts, social signals, founder credibility, liquidity metrics, and helps us detect 94% of scam tokens. It's a constantly evolving system."

As per Singhal, Compliance is another area where CoinSwitch has taken the load off users. "Under Indian tax laws, decentralised transactions require the user to deduct and pay TDS themselves, a process many are unaware of. We take on the TDS burden, deducting and paying it on behalf of users. They don't have to worry about compliance at all."

Notably, the appetite for early-stage tokens is growing rapidly among crypto investors. According to Singhal, nearly 60% of CoinSwitch users engage with new token listings, and the ability to invest early, the day a token is launched, offers significant upside. The benefit, he said, is that even if one of the early-stage bets works, the returns can be exponential. "...Just like Bitcoin, once priced in cents, now above $110,000."

CoinSwitch has seen 34% of its active traders engage with new tokens in the last six months. The CoinSwitch co-founder claims the Bengaluru-based platform is one of the very few platforms globally, which is offering this kind of access in such a seamless way.

Globally, decentralised exchanges are scaling fast. As per crypto analytics firm Dune, DEX platforms have recorded over $2.45 trillion in trading volume over the past 12 months, with nearly 200 million unique trading addresses interacting with blockchains.

However, here in India, decentralised finance is just beginning, says Singhal, asserting that blockchain makes the system equal for everyone. "...Code decides loan eligibility, not your relationship with a bank manager, that's the power of DeFi in a diverse country like India," he said. He added that trading will be the first DeFi use case Indian investors adopt, followed by real-world applications like lending and remittances.