Buy used cars in India through Bitcoin

 The cryptocurrency Bitcoin was mentioned during the annual budget speed by Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister but they were not declared illegal in India. A Mumbai-based startup Truebil, which runs a used car marketplace has now started accepting bitcoins as payments for used cars. The start-up claims that it is a perfectly legal way of payment in India. 

 The start-up is not accepting the payments directly. Instead, Unocoin, a website that lets you trade cryptocurrencies is a partner of the start-up. Customer will have to pay Unocoin through bitcoin and they will deposit the similar amount in the start-up’s bank account, which will complete the transaction. Truebil will not display the car prices in crypto-asset form or accept any online payment.

Truebil will use Unocoin’s point-of-sale applications in its stores to accept bitcoin payments. This will be done at their dealerships. Customers cannot pay the start-up directly or transfer the crypto-asset in Truebil’s account. 

 After the customer chooses a vehicle, Unocoin gives a barcode to Truebil. This barcode displays the price of a particular car in bitcoin value. The value stays locked for 30 minutes period and if the customer chooses to make the payment within in the lock-in period, the price will not change. If the payment exceeds the 30 minute lock-in period, the price will be updated with latest bitcoin price. 

 Shubh Bansal, co-founder, Truebil said to TechCircle, 

“Once the customer decides to pay using a bitcoin wallet, the Unocoin PoS can be used to deduct the crypto-asset which will be changed into fiat currency and transferred to our account in 24 hours,”

Unocoin will not charge the customers or the start-up for the payment process. Both the parties will get the transaction and conversion services for free. However, a law firm has said that such transaction will be on the government radar. RBI has also issued a series of regulation indicating security-related risks related to the dealing of cryptocurrencies.

This is the first time a car dealership is offering such a dealing using bitcoin in India. There are a few restaurants in India which announced the acceptance of Bitcoins as payments. The crypto-currency is slowly getting accepted worldwide. As per Unocoin, this new arrangement will open new avenues for crypto-currencies in India. In the future, we may see more people doing transactions using the cryptocurrencies.