'Informal Pressure' from Central Bank RBI Forces Coinbase to Halt Service in India

​The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has revealed that it halted operation in India a few days after launch due to "informal pressure" from the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), said CEO Brian Armstrong.

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Coinbase launched in India on April 7. Armstrong went to India for the launch. The company said at the time that users could use the UPI system to buy cryptocurrencies on the platform. However, the company disabled the UPI option a few days later.

"There's a lot of interest in crypto amongst the people there in India. So we had an integration with what's called UPI. And this was a great example of just our international strategy," Armstrong said during the earnings call. He elaborated: "A few days after launching, we ended up disabling UPI because of some informal pressure from the Reserve Bank of India, which is kind of the Treasury equivalent there."

He continued:"But I think our preference is really just to work with them and focus on relaunching. I think there's a number of paths that we have to relaunch with other payment methods there. And that's the default path going forward. Armstrong concluded:"My hope is that we will be live back in India in relatively short order, along with a number of other countries, where we're pursuing international expansion similarly."