blog post by Lightspeed India Partners, which has backed startups like Byju’s, Sharechat and Apna.
“Many of these markets have under-performing equity markets with no aspirational stock symbols that the young investors want to own,” Hemant Mohapatra, partner at the fund, wrote in the blogpost.
The fund started investing in crypto and blockchain startups in crypto in 2013. “Young people in these markets now have an opportunity to invest into globally known symbols — bitcoin, ethereum, and dogecoin.”
Mohapatra said that India and South Asia were the largest epicentres of crypto and blockchain technology. “While advanced crypto economies such as China and US are seeing a shift from peer-to-peer volume to more institutional volume, there is significant headroom in the emerging crypto markets in just peer-to-peer volume.”
He added that favorable regulation, currency debasement, and a lackluster stock market performance was also causing a lot of the younger people to select crypto as their first choice of investment over stocks.
In the blog post published on Medium, Mohapatra traced the evolution of the market and opportunities in the blockchain and crypto space – decentralised finance, nonfungible tokens, and blockchain infrastructure.
The post highlighted how far India’s ecosystem had come in terms of talent and a seemingly positive regulatory environment. “There are over 10,000 “blockchain developer” jobs currently open in India on LinkedIn alone, compared to 30,000 in the US. Few years ago, this number was in the 100s at best,” he said.
Mohapatra wrote in the post that the India and Southeast Asia region has seen a bunch of exchanges emerge in the last few years and that consolidation may be on the horizon. This year, crypto selling platforms
CoinDCX and
CoinSwitch Kuber attained the unicorn status – privately held companies valued at more than $1 billion.
“We now expect this category to consolidate in the coming years as larger exchanges pull ahead and brokerages start to differentiate on ease-of-use, brand, and customer service. This is an area of prime focus for Lightspeed and we are always looking to invest in highly differentiated products (e.g. social investing) built by strong teams,” he said.
The fund will be on the lookout for founders who are solving real-world problems in the domain of NFT, DeFi, and blockchain infrastructure. DeFi, according to Mohapatra, could especially help the India and South Asia economies with solutions like crypto-backed credit/debit card, SMB credit or international remittances — “all large unmet needs in the India and South East Asia markets”.
