Clubhouse Crypto: Why Everyone Wants an Invite

Clubhouse Crypto: Why Everyone Wants an Invite

At approximately 1 a.m. ET on Jan. 30, somewhere outside New York City, a CoinDesk reporter came across what could be crypto’s next craze. Or perhaps its latest trial. While searching the annals of Clubhouse, the increasingly popular audio-only app, I stumbled across a dark conspiracy: A group of men masquerading as lizards building a new cryptocurrency.

A lounge of men masquerading as lizards had gathered as tokens teleported from an originating contract into their digital wallets. And here, basking in the light of public display, they discussed how to get the word out. A full-on, unfettered conversation.

“Are we on 4chan yet?” one asked, mentioning the pseudo-anonymous messaging board known as a font of memes and anti-social messages. They weren’t, but things apparently had gone awry anyway.

“What do you mean we got rugged again? Did someone add more liquidity?”

“No, no one even sold yet.”

“Don’t say that in the chat.”

“I’ve screenshotted this chat, so if we get rugged I know it’s one of you guys.”

“I still have more questions.”

“I still have no lizard.”

“Only 666,666 lizard. Few understand this.”

That’s not the type of commentary one would imagine coming from, say, Satoshi Nakamoto when unveiling Bitcoin to the world. But it’s the pinnacle of social performativity that has found a home on Clubhouse.

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Clubhouse is a social media platform open to anyone with an invite and an iPhone. It has become the place to be for tech moguls and, more and more, crypto tastemakers looking to chat. Elon Musk pops in from time to time to talk about bitcoin and dogecoin, while other crypto luminaries including Meltem Demirors, Caitlin Long and Neeraj Agrawal appear more regularly.

Like any social media platform, Clubhouse is what you make of it. There’s room enough for genuine discussion alongside scammers and multi-level marketing schemes. Some see it as the next vector for crypto adoption, which could be true; others as a way to replace some of the socialization missing during the pandemic age. It can get pretty weird, pretty quick.

None know this better than Arya Bahmanyar, better known by his alias CoinDaddy, and his coterie of technologists and artists building “Lizard ETH.” Though Bahmanyar would reject being called a Lizard “leader” – there are no “devs,” he said – he was the figure to answer for the group, when a reporter came sniffing around.

In a message he pinned to the group’s public Telegram channel, Bahmanyar said Lizard is a “meme art project” and a “statement on the absurdity of DeFi and the current state of Ethereum.” It has no prescribed value or use, and anyone can claim LZRD for free (except for Ethereum gas fees).

Its main utility, in fact, seems to be as an icon around which a group of like-minded friends can talk and s**tpost. “It is a project of friendship,” Vincent Terracciano, a member of the LZRD Telegram channel, told CoinDesk repeatedly.

In crypto’s decade-long run, the distinction between memes and this novel form of money has become difficult to parse. In 2013, people made sense of bitcoin by calling it “magic internet money.” In 2017, lambos were a shared desire of the nouveau riche. This summer saw the rise of yield farms, where “DeFi degens” would plow ETH into Yams, Sushi and Pickles.

CoinDesk Chief Content Officer Michael Casey went as far as saying money itself has always been a meme. So it makes sense to talk about the “internet’s native money” in terms of a language born on the web. Further, one could expect that anywhere a meme could thrive, crypto would too.

Crypto club

Like all good and decent technologies, Clubhouse is flattening hierarchies among users and providing a space for anyone to be heard – literally. That may sound odd to say about a company that has thrived on hype around its exclusivity – you have to be invited to the club, for now – but the app’s appeal is more than just FOMO or bragging rights.

“It’s not just a phone call,” Steven McKie, a founding partner at the crypto-focused venture firm Amentum Capital, said over Zoom. “Anyone can randomly pop in and out, so everyone maintains this modicum of professionalism by default. It really does feel like a good episode of [National Public Radio] sometimes.”

Others have compared the experience to tuning into a podcast, going to a conference or hanging out at a coffee house. This clubby vibe, bordering on yuppie professionalism, hasn’t been lost as the app grows. December’s 600,000 users has surged to six million. Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $10 million in May, reinvested in January at a $1 billion valuation.

“Everybody loves podcasts in the crypto space. What better than an ephemeral podcast where you just had to be there,” McKie said. “Especially during COVID this past year, we’ve just been glued to our phones, reading things on Twitter, Slack and Telegram. It’s just exhausting.” To the extent that Clubhouse offers something new, it’s by making it easier to engage empathetically with other people, McKie said.

Apart from semi-private lizard lounges, this reporter has tuned in for guitar jams and listened to lawyers debating Twitter bans, all in service of the job. There’s always at least five channels dedicated to self-help and often at least one meta-room focused on Clubhouse moderation and etiquette.

And crypto-specific rooms? There’s investment advice for newbies. Chats about the granularities of bitcoin’s source code. CoinDesk has been experimenting with running rooms focused on news events. Both the number of crypto groups and their relative size are growing along with Clubhouse and CoinMarketCap’s worth.

A club called “Bitcoin” had just over 12,000 followers on Jan. 15. Less than a month later it’s approaching 20,000. While that particular group, which hosts the Weekly Bitcoin Meetup, is led by the closest thing crypto has to public figures – including Brekkie von Bitcoin, Dan Held, Marty Bent, Amanda Fab, Nic Carter, among others – that’s not the case across the board.

Many of the most prominent voices on Crypto Clubhouse are relative unknowns on the “it’s always Blockchain Week somewhere” conference circuit. Few have Twitter clout.

Arya Bahmanyar, aka CoinDaddy (Arya Bahmanyar/YouTube)

“I’ve been educating people on bitcoin since 2013. There’s been nothing like Clubhouse so far,” Lamar Wilson, a crypto startup founder and influencer, told CoinDesk in a video interview.

Wilson is far from unknown among early bitcoin adopters, though he isn’t a name often in the news. He founded Pheeva wallet, an early backdoor to get bitcoin wallets on iPhones (before that portal was slammed shut) and runs the Koinda Facebook group, which boasts about 25,000 followers.

He also runs the Black Bitcoin Billionaires group on Clubhouse, which has grown past 17,000 followers in under two months. The group holds themed discussions on a daily and weekly basis, frequently moderated by Najah Roberts, chief visionary officer of an over-the-counter desk called Crypto Blockchain Plug. They both put in at least four hours a day running rooms or popping into others.

Crypto Virgin Hours is probably the best-known chat room. It attracts approximately 200 participants every afternoon, offering a chance for the interested but unanointed to ask basic questions about wallets and coins.

“Our mission is to onboard the world onto bitcoin,” Wilson said. “People always ask if I have to be Black to be in the group. No – It’s called that just to say it’s run by Black people, but everyone is welcome.” To that end, Black Bitcoin Billionaires partnered with Cash App to get one million satoshis in Black hands during February.

Wilson considers bitcoin to be a tool for Black people to accumulate wealth to pass to the next generation. “Bitcoin is a great equalizer. It’s an asset anyone can have access to without worrying that anyone can take it from you,” he said.

“Clubhouse is the first big social media application that Black people have been an early majority on,” Wilson said. “In every room that you’re in, it’s at least 50% Black. I think it’s because this is what we do as Black people. We go to barber shops, we go to beauty salons and talk. It fits the African American culture.”

The DOGE house

On a day I tuned in, Roberts was fielding a lot of questions about dogecoin, generally steering people away from the meme currency. “It has no purpose, it’s a parody coin. I can’t explain it,” she said, with a laugh. “I have some for fun. But I don’t even know what exchange mine is on. I’ve had it since 2017.”

Although she called it a “pump and dump,” Roberts didn’t put investors off, telling them, “If you made money, be comfortable with your profits.”

While it’d be a mistake to say Clubhouse is a haven of sound investment advice, it seems less scammy than the bowels of Telegram or Discord. In part, that’s from the efforts of people like Roberts, Wilson and others including Cory Klippsten, founder of SwanBitcoin.

If you spend any amount of time on the crypto side of Clubhouse, you’re bound to bump into a couple of people with “SwanBitcoin” in their usernames, the name of the bitcoin startup for which they work. They’re not there to shill their app necessarily, but usually trying to educate users on the good word of bitcoin.

Klippsten joined the app in December and immediately got to work bringing others like him aboard. First he brought his colleagues, then his friends, before ultimately spinning up a Telegram chat to “hack” a way to share invites. (Clubhouse gives out invites to each new person who joins, and additional invites for those most active on the app.) He estimates this scheme brought in more than 1,000 bitcoin proselytizers.

“Now, basically two-thirds of Bitcoin Twitter is on there,” he told me over Zoom. “The purpose is to make sure, if the word ‘bitcoin’ is used, there’s a bitcoiner there in the conversation to explain reality.” This isn’t to say Klippsten is a “toxic maximalist,” an epithet used to describe people who still think of Ethereum as an alt-coin project.

“That’s what’s great about Clubhouse, you’re talking to real humans. It’s not the same as 280 characters on Twitter, where you fire something off and you’re done,” he said. He recalled one room where someone started “going off” on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was quickly moderated.

“Even if you disagree with some things he’s done – I disagree with some things Cash App has done – that’s inappropriate when you’re doing it on audio,” he said.

That said, the self-moderation of Clubhouse can only go so far. Like other social platforms, there have been numerous reports of misogynist, racism, anti-Semitism and outright bullying. Clubhouse’s founders, who declined to be interviewed, has largely been silent on such issues so far.

“You know, the system isn’t perfect, but it’s a beta platform that’s growing. I do think that there are way more pockets of positivity than negativity,” Bomani X, a pseudonymous artist and former face of the app, told CoinDesk.

Bomani said one of the biggest draws has been the connections he made in the crypto community. He works as a digital strategist for musicians such as Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne, and chatting on Clubhouse has gotten him to think about how crypto could expand artists’ rights over their own music.

Nothing is in the works right now, but he’s thinking about how blockchain can refigure broken payment models for artists and create new opportunities for fan engagement. “I definitely would love to see what the music-crypto space has to offer, especially as a creator myself,” Bomani said.

Meanwhile, Ayra Bahmanyar said Lizard “is a completely neutral canvas everyone who feels they want to can paint on.”

Bitcoin Hits $1 Trillion Value as Crypto Leads Other Assets

TipRanks

Let’s talk about gold. The precious metal is the traditional safe haven investment, backed by its use – starting 5,000 years ago – as a reliable store of value. Investors looking to protect their portfolio and secure their wealth traditionally bought heavily into gold, and the price of gold has sometimes been used as a proxy (albeit an inverse one) for general economic health. In a recent report, investment firm J.P. Morgan took a long look at the state of the gold industry – specifically, the gold mining industry. Analyst Tyler Langton points out an underlying paradox in two basic facts about gold mines. “Over time, in a commodity business, the lowest cost producers with the longest life assets tend to be the relative winners… Gold mines, when compared to base metals, typically have much shorter mines (sic) lives, and the gold miners have to focus on replacing reserves to maintain levels of production,” Langton noted. At first glance, Langton’s paradox may seem to point away from heavy investments in gold mines. After all, these are high-risk commodity producers. But current times are actually pretty good for gold miners. Prices are elevated compared to recent years; the metal is running just under $1,800 per ounce now, but it peaked above $2,000 in August of last year, at the height of the corona shutdowns, and it was as low as $1,200 just 18 months ago. The current high prices bode well for producers. Langton states his belief that there is support for current prices, with gold and gold mines being seen as a hedge against ‘macro uncertainty.’ He believes that the main sources of support will be found in “real interest rates remaining lower for longer and COVID-19 related stimulus measures continuing to expand central bank balance sheets.” With this in the background, Langton and his colleagues have begun selecting the gold mining stocks they see as winners in the current environment. Unsurprisingly, they like the companies that show discipline on M&A activity, a focus on free cash flow, and solid returns to shareholders. Using the TipRanks database, we’ve pulled up the details on several of their recent picks. Are they as good as gold? The analysts seem to think so; all are Buy-rated and potentially offer significant upside. Let’s dig in. Kinross Gold Corporation (KGC) First up, Kinross Gold, is a mid-cap company– valued at $8.6 billion – with active mining operations in the US, Brazil, West Africa, and Russia. Taken together, these operations have proven and probable gold reserves of 29.9 million ounces. The company is guiding toward 2.4 million ounces in total production for 2021, rising to 2.9 million ounces by 2023. The company’s profitability can be seen by cost of sales per ounce, at $790, and the all-in sustaining cost, at $1,025 per ounce. With gold currently selling at $1,782 on the commodity exchanges, Kinross’s near-term success is clear. Two sets of statistics highlight Kinross’ profitability. First, the company’s recent record of quarterly results shows steadily rising revenues and earnings. Aside from a dip in 1Q20, at the start of the corona crisis, Kinross’ revenues have been gaining steadily since the start of 2019 – and even in 2020, every quarter showed a year-over-year increase. After 7 years without dividend payments, Kinross used its strong performance in recent months to restore the company dividend. Payments are still made irregularly, but since announcing in September 2020 that the dividend would be reinstated, two payments have been made and a third has been announced for March of this year. Each payment has been for 3 cents per share, which translates to a modest yield of 1.6%. The key point here is not strength of the yield, but rather, the confidence that management has displayed in the near- to mid-term by restarted dividend payments. Based on current production projections, the payments are expected to continue until 2023. Tyler Langton, in his notes on Kinross, comes to a bullish conclusion: “Given its expected growth projects and pipeline of additional projects, we think Kinross will be able to maintain average annual production of 2.5mm oz. over the next decade. The company has an attractive cost profile, and we expect costs to decrease over the next several years. The company should also generate attractive strong levels of FCF at current gold prices, and we expect Kinross to direct this cash toward internal growth projects and its dividend.” In line with these comments, he selects Kinross as JPM’s ‘top pick in the gold sector,’ and rates the stock as Overweight (i.e., a Buy). His $11 price target suggests a 61% upside potential in the coming year. (To watch Langton’s track record, click here) Kinross gets a Strong Buy recommendation from the analyst consensus, based on a 6 to 2 split between the Buy and Hold reviews. Wall Street’s analysts have set an average price target of $11.25, slightly more bullish than Langton’s, and implying a one-year upside of 64% from the current trading price of $6.85. (See KGC stock analysis on TipRanks) SSR Mining, Inc. (SSRM) Moving up north to Canada, we now take a look at Vancouver-based SSR Mining. This is another mid-cap mining company, producing gold and silver in quantity through four active mines in Canada, the US, Argentina, and Turkey. The Canadian, US, and Turkish operations produce primarily gold, while the Puna operation is Argentina’s largest silver mine. Although SSR missed on both the top- and bottom-line estimates in its latest quarterly report, for the 2020 full-year production numbers, the company met the previously set guidance. Gold production for the year hit 643,000 ounces, with 31% of that total coming in the fourth quarter. Silver production at the Puna mine reached 5.6 million ounces, beating the guidance figures. Fourth quarter production was 39% of the total. Last November, the company announced that it will be initiating a dividend policy starting in 1Q21. The ‘base dividend’ will be set at 5 cents per share, or a 1% yield; as with KGC above, the key point is not whether the dividend is high or low, but that management is starting to pay it out – a sign of confidence in the future. Langton bases his assessment of SSRM on its strong free cash flow forecast, writing, “At current gold forward prices, we estimate that SSR will generate close to $400mm of FCF in 2021 and around $500mm per year from 2022-2024. Furthermore, starting from a 2021 base, we forecast that SSR would generate cumulative FCF from 2021- 2025 of US$2.3bn, or roughly 59% of its current market cap…” In line with his comments, Langton puts an Overweight (i.e. Buy) rating on the stock, along with a $24 price target that indicates a 60% upside for the next 12 months. (To watch Langton’s track record, click here) There are 8 recent reviews on SSRM shares – and every single one of them is a Buy, making the Strong Buy analyst consensus rating here unanimous. The stock is selling for $15.25, and its robust $28.78 average price target suggests a high 89% one-year upside. (See SSRM stock analysis on TipRanks) Newmont Mining (NEM) Last on the list, Newmont, is the world’s largest gold miner, boasting a $45.78 billion market cap, and active production in a variety of metals, including gold, silver, copper, zinc, and lead. The company has assets – both operations and prospects – in North and South America, Africa, and Australia, and is the only gold miner listed on the S&P 500. With that last detail in mind, it’s worth noting that NEM shares are up 29% in the last 12 months – more than the S&P’s gain of 16% over the same period. In 3Q20, the company showed $3.12 billion in revenue. While this missed the forecast, it did improve on the prior year’s Q3 by 5.4%. The Q3 results were also a company record, with a free cash flow of $1.3 billion. Results below expectations were a common pattern for the company’s 2020 performance in Q1 and Q2, as well. The corona crisis depressed results, but even the depressed results were up year-over-year. Newmont has an active capital return program for shareholders. Since the beginning of 2019, the company has used both dividends and share repurchases to return capital to stakeholders, to the tune of $2.7 billion. This past January, Newmont announced a $1 billion continuation of the share repurchases. Looking ahead to 2021, the company has also announced a new dividend framework, setting the base payment at $1 per share annualized, and reiterated its commitment to capital return. JPM’s Michael Glick led the note on Newmont, starting out by acknowledging the company’s strong production: “We are forecasting NEM’s attributable gold production to remain relatively steady over the 2021-2025 time frame at around 6.5-6.7mm oz…” Of the company’s mid-term production prospects Glick went on to say, “In terms of production, the ongoing expansion at Tanami should deliver incremental production and lower cash costs starting in 2023. Additionally, we expect Newmont to approve its Ahafo North and Yanacocha Sulfides projects this year, which should bring on incremental production for the company after the projects’ roughly three-year development time-line.” Glick likes Newmont’s FCF and production numbers, using them to back his Overweight (Buy) rating. His $83 price target implies an upside of 46% for the months ahead. (To watch Glick’s track record, click here) Newmont, for all its strength, still gets a Moderate Buy rating from the analyst consensus. This is based on 8 reviews, including 5 Buys and 3 Holds. The average price target is $74.97, suggesting room for 31% growth from the current trading price of $56.99. (See NEM stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for gold stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

A ‘crypto’ scam is brewing on Twitter, and social media at large

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Two weeks ago, a Mumbai-based fan of the Korean pop ( K-pop ) band BTS realised that she and her connections had been inadvertently following a cryptocurrency account on Twitter Over the next few days, cryptocurrency-related posts began to show up on the timelines of ARMY—Adorable Representative MC for Youth, the term associated with millions of BTS fans.The BTS fans also noted that quite a few cryptocurrency accounts were being tagged in ARMY giveaways or rewards provided to users selected at random, including albums or merchandise worth $25 to $250 on average—a common practice among K-pop fan clubs. They figured that certain ARMY giveaway hosts were asking them to also follow cryptocurrency handles, without providing any guidance on its potential risks.It soon became obvious that targeting the youth had been a masterstroke as the crypto community itself is dominated by Gen Z and millennials.Crypto could really use the credibility of a huge following comprising young and active users, especially in an environment where digital currency is in a legal grey area across the world.An ET investigation revealed that a bunch of these cryptocurrency accounts in India and abroad had been able to penetrate genuine Twitter handles or influence the influencers within communities like gaming and K-pop fandom to divert their followers to their accounts.Twitter quickly moved to block crypto accounts on the grounds that they had been using inauthentic means to inflate their followers and amplify content.Twitterati among the ARMY stumbled upon the scam when some younger members said they had been receiving calls from various countries after clicking on certain giveaway links.“On digging deeper, we found some of the highly followed ARMY accounts had sold their accounts to what seemed like shady cryptocurrency accounts,” the Mumbai-based ARMY fan who was following one such suspended account said.The ARMY account’s username, handle, display picture — all had changed to match the crypto vibes.All ARMY-related posts had been replaced. What remained were posts on crypto, for crypto, and by crypto folks.Buried under 6,000-plus crypto tweets of the last two months was one BTS-related retweet from 2019, the only thing that could prove it had once been an ARMY account.As is the case with most scams, a pattern started to emerge.The few ARMY accounts hosting crypto-sponsored giveaways were all hyping each other up and urging their followers to engage with the same set of crypto accounts. If they asked fellow ARMY to also follow their new backup accounts, it meant their main account would turn into a crypto account soon.When ARMY members started questioning these crypto accounts, most either blocked their critics or temporarily deactivated the accounts. Some ARMY accounts, meanwhile, admitted to taking commissions for crypto giveaways and apologised.After ET flagged some of these suspicious accounts, Twitter suspended them overnight. “We’ve taken action on a few thousand such accounts for attempting to inauthentically inflate their following and amplify content,” a Twitter spokesperson told ET.“If people see suspicious activity, the most important thing they can do is report it to us,” the spokesperson added.Speaking of suspicious activities, a lot of the crypto accounts that the compromised ARMY promoted also had an ‘egg’ emoji in their Twitter bio and username. It’s a mystery we could not solve and decided to file under the dark internet subculture.Between 2015 and 2018, the internet was rife with giveaway marketing stunts.Called airdrops, these distributed free crypto “coins” and “tokens” as part of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), an IPO-equivalent for crypto — to promote virtual currency.Many were eventually revealed to be scams.A lot of these airdrops were just Ponzi and pyramid schemes set up to create a crypto bubble, experts told ET.“Giveaway projects are typically used as growth hacks where every retweet can fetch a 0.01% extra return, say 400 retweets in return for 100 extra coins. They take different formats such as simple meme competitions or follow-back initiatives on Twitter,” said Ramani Ramachandran, CEO of Singapore-based blockchain firm ZPX.Be that as it may, the community is split on the matter, he added, and five out of 10 traders would tell you that a giveaway project is a growth hack and not a scam.Nonetheless, in 2018, Twitter announced guidelines prohibiting any form of crypto ICO advertisements on its platform.This time around, however, crypto evangelists reckon that the giveaway scam may not be about cryptocurrency at all. That has made it an even bigger worry.“Scamsters may be looking at youngsters in highly-engaged communities such as gaming, football or K-Pop because they are easier targets,” said one crypto evangelist on condition of anonymity.A typical scam would involve a link that takes the victim to a third-party website, where it may use a three-pronged approach depending on the type of scam.One, it may seek a young user’s credit card or crypto wallet details for potential phishing attacks. Two, their personal details for potential hacking attempts. Three, they may wrongfully charge a subscription fee to dupe young users.The most innocuous result of this would be when scamsters — who work in tandem — announce a winner from their own group after amassing a huge following through a giveaway alert.The malicious result is when they hack into a user’s system, gain access to remote devices and use that for blackmail.In fact, in the words of one frustrated ARMY member: “Ever since we have called out these suspicious giveaway accounts, they have created new accounts and are harassing and calling for blocking of legitimate ARMY accounts. This is happening to other K-pop fan communities as well. We are being targeted for refusing to let them (crypto accounts) use us! We don’t want to be dragged into this. We just want our space back.”The shadowy crypto accounts had missed a trick, though.Little did they know that BTS fans adhere to an unwritten commandment: “Thou shalt not make money off BTS.”“I’ve noticed this common wariness among hardcore ARMY that people are always out to take advantage of ARMY clout and make a quick buck. It’s amazing how strict they are about discouraging this,” said an ARMY fan from Hyderabad who is in her 40s.In June last year, when BTS donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, its loyal fan club matched that within a day and donated to the cause.“Our BLM donation made news everywhere. Maybe these crypto guys got greedy and thought it would be easy to make a quick buck out of us,” said another Indian-Canadian ARMY fan in her late 30s.In fact, last week, 34 of the most prominent ARMY fan bases from around the world got together on Twitter to warn gullible ARMY members against these sponsored crypto giveaways, even urging caution with self-funded and ARMY-funded giveaways as well. They also requested members to unfollow and block suspicious accounts.“We have never nor will we ever partner with/participate in/promote/or host sponsored giveaways,” they said in a statement.Twitter urges users to be more vigilant and report suspicious accounts.However, those at the receiving end of these scams look at this as a cop-out on the platform’s behalf and question why they should carry the burden of moderating bad elements.The Indian cryptocurrency community, too, must call out the bad actors and actively discourage low-quality crypto assets, said Nitin Sharma, partner at Antler Global and previously the founder of Incrypt Blockchain.Over the past two years, there has been a steady traction towards a flourishing crypto community in India, even though it is still not the most mature or advanced cryptocurrency market in the world like the United States, Russia or Japan.Recently, the Supreme Court overturned a banking ban on trading crypto assets, triggering a massive influx of new sign-ups and trading activities. But the government is mulling a ban on both the trading and holding of all forms of cryptocurrency.“We firmly believe that the government will sooner than later move towards regulation of cryptocurrency in India rather than banning it altogether,” said Nischal Shetty, founder of leading Indian cryptocurrency exchange Wazir X and part of popular cryptocurrency campaign #IndiaWantsCrypto. “We want to ensure that when the regulators come, it’s a cleaner ecosystem than a dirty one to govern and supervise.”(Illustration and graphics by Rahul Awasthi)