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.
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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.
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