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Singapore-headquartered Pillow plans to discontinue all its providers and app within the coming weeks, it warned clients Friday, citing regulatory uncertainty that has claimed numerous different crypto startups in current quarters.
Pillow allowed clients to put money into Bitcoin, stablecoins and altcoins, and promised returns of as much as 18% — a determine that dropped to 14% because the market began to chill. It had raised about $21 million altogether and counted Accel India, Quona Capital, Elevation Capital and Bounce Crypto amongst its backers. Pillow revealed its $18 million Sequence A funding in October final yr.
In a submit on Telegram, the two-year-old startup requested clients on Friday to withdraw all their funds from the Pillow app and mentioned will probably be terminating all its present providers on July 31, 2023.
The transfer follows Pillow’s chief rival Flint shutting down its providers final month resulting from what it termed as “regulatory hurdles” and “adverse market sentiment.”
Each the startups, based and operated in India, counted the South Asian nation amongst their largest markets. The Reserve Financial institution of India, the nation’s central financial institution, has been pushing lenders to cease partaking with crypto startups for over a yr, making it nearly unattainable for web3 startups to function within the nation.
Crypto big Coinbase, one of many world’s largest exchanges, discovered this out the exhausting means. It suspended help for UPI funds instrument on its app in India final yr, making its eponymous trade nonfunctional for any buy orders lower than 4 days after launching the buying and selling service on this planet’s second-largest web market.
Coinbase chief government Brian Armstrong alleged final yr that there are “parts within the authorities there, together with at Reserve Financial institution of India, who don’t appear to be as optimistic on it. And they also — within the press, it’s been known as a ‘shadow ban,’ principally, they’re making use of gentle strain behind the scenes to attempt to disable a few of these funds, which may be going via UPI.”