Bitcoin drops as Indian banks suspend cryptocurrency trading accounts

Cryptocurrency exchange accounts are having a hard time in India.

Bitcoin’s skyrocketing price has been seeing a decline gradually ever since 2018 has started. Last week, it faced a severe blow when its price dropped to $10,000. The cryptocurrency observed another drop in value recently when various Banks across India started crackdown against cryptocurrencies trade. Bitcoin which was trading at $12,800 on Saturday dropped to $12,000 and is trading below $11,600 as of writing.

On Friday, various big names of the banking sector of India including State Bank of India (SBI), Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Yes Bank have taken strict actions against crypto exchanges. According to the local reports, all of these banks have either suspended accounts of the cryptocurrency exchanges or have intensely limited the functionality of these accounts. The report indicated that banks have been observing suspicious transactions from these accounts.

A couple of weeks ago, Koinex, an emerging cryptocurrency exchange based in Mumbai said that Indian banks have been creating delays and hindrances in transactions. According to a blog post,

“In the past few days, many of our users have faced difficulties with Indian Rupee (INR) withdrawals on Koinex. A tussle between our payment service partner and their bank has caused an indefinite delay in the settlement of a large portion of deposits to Koinex in the past two weeks.”

Although this crackdown of banks can be considered as the first impositions on cryptocurrencies, however, last month Indian ministry of finance gave a strict statement against cryptocurrencies, calling Bitcoin and altcoins to be “Ponzi Schemes”. The ministry gave an awareness note to the public which stated that volatility in the price of digital currencies is due to speculations and there is high risk in investing in them.