WazirX Stuck in Tough Tides Between Regulators’ Scrutiny and Binance’s Ignorance

• WazirX uses an auto-matching P2P (peer-to-peer) engine.
• More than 450 crypto trading pairings are available on the WazirX app.

WazirX is an India-based most trusted and secured cryptocurrency exchange, it has headquarters in Mumbai and was launched in 2018. The exchange uses an auto-matching P2P (peer-to-peer) engine, the P2P engine was introduced by WazirX in India after the central bank prohibited banks from dealing business with cryptocurrency firms. 

Nischal Shetty, Sameer Mhatre, and Siddharth Menon founded WazirX in 2018, and Binance acquired it in 2019. To include its users in developing WazirX and reward them appropriately for their achievements, WazirX issued WRX tokens. The introduction of the WazirX (WRX) token, which will have a maximum of 1 billion coins, was announced by Binance on January 21, 2020. 

Once the embargo was lifted and banks were allowed to work with cryptocurrency exchanges the ZebPay exchange took weeks to add INR deposits to its platform, ZebPay was then ranked 1 in India with 2-3 times the workforce. The WazirX team, a very small group worked all night to get it ready for launch the next day.

More than 450 cryptocurrency trading pairings are available on the WazirX app along with over 250 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, BCH, USDT, DOGE, ADA, SHIB, LTC, SOL, and USDC.

With a market share of between 60 and 70%, WazirX is India’s largest NFT marketplace. In January 2022, WazirX was the dominant cryptocurrency exchange in India. Following that, on February 22, 2022, WazirX recorded a 24-hour trading volume of around $55 million, with 428 trading pairings and 229 coins accessible. 

WazirX is Under Monitoring

WazirX is the target of this major action by the ED, an Indian regulatory body in charge of monitoring economic crimes, for allegedly enabling the purchase and transfer of virtual cryptocurrency assets on behalf of scam Instant Loan App firms with their headquarters in China.

The show cause notice (SCN) under FEMA was sent to WazirX. According to the State Minister for Finance’s confirmation, the Indian cryptocurrency exchange is charged with approving transactions worth more than $350 million USD in cryptocurrency assets to unidentified wallets.

Additionally, according to the official announcement, the ED has frozen assets belonging to WazirX worth roughly 64.67 crores INR or 8.142 million USD under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act of 2002. (PMLA).

Binance Acquisition Never Took Place

Binance world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume acquired WazirX in 2019. WazirX claims to have 10M+ users as of around December 2021, and the exchange demanded all Indian users must provide and register with KYC information. When WazriX inquired about how private user information is handled and whether Binance is where the information is kept, It doesn’t offer any explanations or answers.

Following that, in a recent Tweet post, Binance CEO CZ, claims that WazirX is not owned by Binance although the deal was started, it was never finished. There are no shares of WazirX’s parent company that Binance owns.

All crypto-to-crypto transactions on WazirX are now under the regulatory authority of Binance, while Zanmai is in charge of the fiat (INR) to crypto transactions following Binance’s acquisition of WazirX in 2019.