BitOasis secures investment from Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX

Funding will help company drive geographic expansion and develop its products

BitOasis secured a licence to provide broker-dealer services in Dubai earlier this year. Pawan Singh / The National

BitOasis, one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms in the Middle East, has raised funding from Indian digital currency exchange CoinDCX to drive its geographic expansion and develop its products.

The company's existing investors include start-up investment firm Wamda Capital and venture capital firm Jump Capital, the company said on Friday.

BitOasis did not disclose the size of the deal and the company valuation.

“The investment will allow us to sharpen our focus on perfecting our existing products and expanding across our markets,” BitOasis co-founder and chief executive Ola Doudin said.

Sumit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of CoinDCX, said his company was “impressed by BitOasis’s excellent product offering, strong leadership and their persistence to serve customers in the most secure and compliant manner”.

Founded in 2016, BitOasis serves 15 markets across the Mena region.

Since it began operations, the company has processed more than $5 billion in trading volumes and raised more than $35 million in funding from regional and global investors such as Jump Capital, Pantera and Wamda Capital.

Earlier this year, BitOasis secured a licence from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority to provide broker-dealer services in the emirate.

BitOasis said in July that it was working closely with Vara after the regulator suspended its operational licence.

Vara said the company's minimum viable product operational licence was put on hold due to continuing supervisory controls of the virtual assets industry in the emirate.

The Mena region is the fastest-growing cryptocurrency market in the world, accounting for 9.2 per cent of global digital currency transactions from July 2021 to June 2022, according to a report by blockchain data platform Chainalysis.

Individual investors in the Mena region received $566 billion in cryptocurrency during the period, an annual increase of 48 per cent, Chainalysis said in its 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index, which was dominated by emerging markets.

Established in 2018, CoinDCX became the first Indian cryptocurrency exchange to become a unicorn – a start-up with a valuation of at least $1 billion – in August 2021 after it raised $90 million during a series C funding that valued it at $1.1 billion, according to its website.

That funding round was led by B Capital Group, established by former Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and returning investors Coinbase Ventures, Polychain, Block.one and Jump Capital, the Indian company said at the time.