View from India: India to get its first Blockchain Lab

The forthcoming Blockchain Lab will address industry-specific issues through its Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) platform. A beta version of the same has already been launched. It is being tested by clients and will be opened to the public in early 2018.

“In the first phase, we are developing BaaS services for target industries like banking and payments, capital markets and supply chain. In the second phase as part of the government's Digital India Initiative, we are working with government OEMs to distribute our AuxLedger nodes in more than 600 districts throughout India,” said Kumar Gaurav, Founder Auxesis Group/Cashaa.

Auxesis Group is a 2014 technical innovation company with advance competency in fintech and blockchain technology. Its first products were cryptocurrency-related ones, followed by white label exchanges, Bitcoin wallets and payment gateways. Over the last two years, the company has been focusing on enterprise blockchain applications and India is a promising market.

India is one of the brightest countries and full of resources when it comes to software and has the largest population of engineers. Despite being one of the world’s largest IT hubs, India was lagging behind in the blockchain space. To overcome this Gaurav started working with E-Cell, IIT Mumbai to run campaigns to increase awareness, organise workshops and lecture series, which helped build a team of highly skilled and talented pool of programmers for consulting and development.

As an early adopter of Bitcoin trade, Auxesis is trying to popularise it in the country. “Demand for Bitcoin in countries like India is high despite there being no official framework, but there first needs to be a way of getting the Bitcoins in the country, for which Cashaa became the go-to point,” Gaurav said.

Cashaa the peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace has been created for international money transfer, matching money senders and receivers with cryptocurrency traders who receive and deliver money in exchange for the cryptocurrency. The service was launched for transfers from UK to India and Nigeria in February 2017 and has been able to deliver money in any bank account in the recipient countries.

“With Cashaa, now for the first time there is a money transfer system which does not discriminate people based on the amount and status, as we have a fixed fee of 1 £/ transaction and we are faster and more convenient than existing services which are slow and expensive, as people lose five per cent to 12 per cent of their money,” he highlighted.

As an enterprise-grade blockchain solutions-providing company, Auxesis caters to large institutions such as banks and governments. Through its identity and KYC solutions it has moved more than 50 million Indian users on its ‘AuxLedger’, while the financial and insurance products have thousands of customers transacting over millions of dollars. The upcoming P2P lending product ‘BitKarz’ is designed for investors the world over to invest in high-growth SME’s in India. The smart contract solution is helping financial institutions to automate their processes.

Working with some of the state governments, Auxesis Group has built AuxLedger for an ID and benefits distribution system which has 53 million users. This initiative is to increase transparency, security and corruption-free governance. Further government blockchain solutions are being planned to expand into areas of healthcare, voting, land registry and value-transfer systems.

Auxesis is the only Indian company ranked in the Top 100 ‘Most influential blockchain company in the world’. The overall goal is to build a blockchain ecosystem in India, to facilitate decentralisation and digitisation.

“Demonetisation in India has increased interest in Bitcoin, signups at exchanges and made Bitcoin trade at a premium of up to 12 per cent in the following month, with up to 600 Bitcoins trading on Indian exchanges each day,” he added.

Until today, the difference is still around five per cent and India's trading activity has just reached 10 per cent of global USD/BTC trading volume in the past month.

View from India has been following the development of blockchain technology in the country this year. E&T has also been tracking the evolution of blockchain, its importance to the future of financial trading and blockchain’s relationship with Bitcoin.