Binance CTO Rohit Wad has singled out India’s Mumbai among the cities from where it’s planning to source web3 talents. He also informed that Binance is looking to invest in some of India’s Web3 startups.
“There is going to be a tremendous boom, in the innovation that comes out of India. In fact, as a beginning step, I would like to see if we can find interns in India and get them bootstrapped on crypto,” he said in an interview with Businessline.
Wad pointed out that Binance is a remote-first company and it encourages employees to work from home. Given this, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume is aiming to offer internships to tech talents from cities including “Toronto, Vancouver, Mumbai, and a few more.”
When asked what kind of investments Binance is planning to make in India, he didn’t name any particular company but explained that they might look at a couple of Indian startups shortly.
In November, Binance CEO Chengpang Zhao (CZ) twice flagged India’s high taxes as something hurting the industry. At Singapore Fintech Festival in November’s first week, he said high taxes could kill the crypto industry in India. Recently, at TechCrunch’s crypto event in Miami, he expressed great disappointment with the 1% transaction tax on crypto transfers.
CZ said this makes India an unviable destination for crypto exchanges and Binance doesn’t have any immediate big plans for India.
While the regulatory and tax environment is not crypto-friendly, India’s vast pool of tech talents is at the forefront of global web3 transformation.
A recent Nasscom report suggested that Indian technology professionals constitute over 13% of the global web3 workforce.
Wad revealed that the company is all set to hire young talents from India’s prominent universities and tech institutes. He said Binance would be particularly looking at Mumbai for this purpose.
According to him, Mumbai is among the top five global tech incubation centers from which Binance will recruit new interns during their summer internship drive next year.
