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The massive value-add to the economy will come as India continues on its path as a leading global player for Web3, both on the development and adoption side, the new report said.
Already, Web3 investments in the country have grown a whopping 37 times from the start of 2020 to the first quarter of 2022.
The report added that the number of start-ups that can be categorized as Web3 companies stood at 450 as of the end of the second quarter. Since 2020, these companies combined have raised more than $1.3bn in capital, with the average deal size being around $10m.
In terms of venture capital, the country was home to more than 70 “active institutional investors” in 2021, the report found.
Notably, it was the launch and subsequent meteoric growth of from 2015 to 2017 that kickstarted the Web3 trend in India. However, the growth accelerated between 2020 and 2021 when a national ban on crypto was lifted in India, the report said.
Among the most noteworthy funding rounds in the Web3 space in India in recent years was the $260m Series C round for the Indian crypto trading app COINSWITCH in 2021, and the competing CoinDCX’s $136m round in 2022.
“[A] Steady pipeline of seed investment has ensured continued growth of the Indian Web3 startup ecosystem, with investments in the mid-late growth stage growing more in the last two years,” Nasscom commented in the report.
The report also added that the top investors in India’s domestic Web3 economy are largely global players. Among the best-known names are Sequoia, Lightspeed, Tiger Global and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), all large US-based venture capital investors with major interest in crypto.
Crypto has never been subject to a complete ban in India, but the country’s central bank – the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) – has in the past prohibited banks from facilitating crypto transactions. The central bank ban was lifted by the Supreme Court in 2020.
