India’s Telangana state government to accredit Web2 and Web3 startups
Indian state Telangana’s government has announced the launching of the India Blockchain Accelerator program for fostering early-stage Web2 and Web3 startups and blockchain developers.
The program aims to solve the real-world challenges of Web2 and Web3 startups. The accelerator program has been announced in partnership with CoinSwitch Kuber, a unicorn crypto exchange and Lumos Labs, which is a technology innovation firm.
The Director Emerging Technology and Officer on Special Duty (OSD) at ITE&C Department of the Government of Telangana, Rama Devi Lanka, has highlighted that the state has an intention of adopting blockchain projects across multiple use cases.
Lanka stated that some of the interesting use cases that Telengana has already piloted in Blockchain technology include – T-Chits (Chit funds in Blockchain), E-voting (Digital Voting platform built on Blockchain and AI), Supply Chain (Seed Traceability), and many more.
According to the state government’s official announcement, its four-month blockchain accelerator initiative would be open to early-stage Web2 and Web3 startups as well as blockchain developers.
The program is seeking blockchain-based solutions for several real-world problems across various business verticals – the industries being fintech, sustainability, infrastructure and tooling, agritech, entertainment, and logistics and healthcare.
The announcement had proclaimed that the Telangana Government would help in providing “the required regulatory framework to enable and promote blockchain growth.”
Lanka has further disclosed the government’s ongoing efforts to identify various use cases in decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFT) and other crypto projects for mainstream implementation.
She also acknowledged a bullish intent towards leveraging the upcoming blockchain innovations, saying that the state government of Telangana also has a deep focus on developing and supporting a large scale of the Indian Blockchain talent pool, which would be “around 100K in the next 3-4 quarters.”
Co-Founder of Lumos Labs, Kaavya Prasad, has also resonated similar sentiments in outlining the state government’s openness to new blockchain initiatives. She even stressed the need for greater interest towards pilot projects and production-ready applications.
Prasad said that a “collaborative effort from various State Governments” would help accelerate the growth of the space, and the team would be able to have more streamlined progress.
Founder and CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber, Ashish Singhal, had said that the best global startups of tomorrow would be running on Web3 blockchain infrastructure, thus focusing on India’s potential to become a net exporter of technology.
Singhal further said that as part of the Indian Crypto industry, the team would endeavour for collaborations with the state government in working towards the vision “of making Telangana the blockchain capital of the country.
A recent report has indicated that the Indian government would not impose a blanket ban on cryptocurrecies. According to news reports from TV News channel NDTV, a note on the crypto bill from the Cabinet meeting has hinted at an upcoming regulation.
A local reporter for NDTV, Sunil Prabhu, informed that the note contained suggestions for regulating cryptocurrencies as crypto assets under the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) supervision in regulation of local crypto exchanges.
