WazirX bets on AI, Futures for comeback after $235 mn hack

NEW DELHI: Crypto exchange WazirX is betting on artificial intelligence-powered products, futures trading and an enhanced customer experience to drive growth as it seeks to regain market share following its court-approved restructuring after last year’s $235 million cyber attack.

Founder Nischal Shetty said the exchange is preparing to launch “WazirX AI”, an artificial intelligence assistant that will allow users to interact with the platform through natural language commands rather than navigating traditional trading interfaces.

“I think that’s the future, where instead of trying to learn how a trading interface operates, where the stop losses are, how do you fill up a form... I think the more natural way of trading for people will be where you just instruct your AI to do things for you, and it does it,” Shetty said.

The AI tool is expected to help users execute trades, conduct research, analyse market sentiment and evaluate investment opportunities. Users could, for instance, instruct the assistant to buy Bitcoin after a 5 per cent price decline, without manually calculating price levels or configuring trading parameters. “It’s just so much more natural to work with AI,” Shetty said.

The assistant could also help investors validate claims circulating on social media and other online forums before making investment decisions. “A lot of traders lose money because they panic, or because they make a decision... seeing a random post online by some random person saying this token will go up by x percentage, and they go and buy. Well, now you can treat them as signals - but you can ask AI is this true, or is there enough data to back this claim? And then take a decision,” he said.

It has also introduced WazirX ZERO, a subscription-based trading model that allows users to trade over 300 tokens for a fixed monthly fee of Rs 99, eliminating per-trade transaction charges. In June, it launched futures trading with maker fees of 0.02 per cent and taker fees of 0.04 per cent, with no volume thresholds.

WazirX resumed operations in October after the Singapore high court cleared its restructuring plan following the cyber attack. Users got 85% of their balances within 10 days of the exchange’s restart, with the remaining claims to be distributed over three years