Koinex - Another Big Indian Crypto Exchange Shuts Shop Today. BTC Below $5000

Blaming on the discouraging and negative stance of Indian government against cryptocurrency industry, yet another well-known crypto-exchange, Koinex, announced to shut down its business this morning. All trading and deposits to Koinex are being suspended w.e.f. 2 pm IST. Other associated services like POOl (P2P) and EXPRESS (Instant crypto-conversion) are also being discontinued.

You can check more details on their official announcement post here:
Koinex shutdown announcement — Termination of exchange services.

If you hold funds with Koinex, you need to withdraw it before 15^th July, 2019. Unlike other crypto-exchanges who scammed users by increasing withdrawal fee at the time of making an exit, Koinex hasn't done any such thing. In fact, it has reduced the minimum withdrawal requirement for many coins. They are also paying INR held with them within 5 weeks period despite their funds in bank accounts are still frozen. However they are levying some convenience charge of INR 10 or INR 2000 (depending on the withdrawal amount) to mitigate economic risks associated with volatile crypto assets from where they plan to fund INR withdrawals for its users.

BTC prices dropped below $5000

However, sudden announcement of shut down of Koinex exchange created enough FUD and people started panic selling. This resulted in drastic fall in the rates of several coins. Half an hour before the trade was scheduled to be suspended, I took the following screen shot with BTC rates plummeting to INR 340,000 i.e. less than $5000. Compare that with market prices of BTC at that time that was hovering between $12,000 and $13,000!!!

_{Panic selling at Koinex (Prices at 13:30 hrs today)}

I don't know why people get so panicked when you could easily withdraw your coins to your wallet or transfer it to another exchange! If I had funds there, I'd have certainly taken advantage of this bargain deals 😊 Were any of you able do just that?

Interesting trivia

As soon as Konex tweeted about their decision to shut down exchange, CEO of another big player viz. Wazirex immediately jumped in to market his own exchange to Koinex users. It appeared to me like celebrating on someone else's demise ...lol!

We need people to shut down our business. We're hiring!

The Koinex website was updated with the notice of termination of their business. However, they still kept displaying that they are still hiring. This was quite funny to me:
Koinex hiring on exit.png