Just three months ago, the Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange, Coinbase went public and now it’s looking to expand its footprint in India, one of the most populous countries worldwide. It has big plans to hire, acquire and make the South Asian nation one of its primary hubs.

Brian Armstrong, the chief executive (CEO) of the company, lately posted a tweet that Coinbase is already creating its office out of the nation – in Hyderabad – and planning to expand its local team.

This includes adding ‘hundreds’ of engineers while also hiring for the design, human resource, product management and user experience teams. As per Pankaj Gupta, the vice president of Engineering and Site Lead in India for Coinbase, these new hires will be among the ‘topmost talent available worldwide’.

According to him, they have ambitious plans for this hub in the upcoming future. They want to recruit hundreds of world-class engineers in the near term.

Anyone who ends up at Coinbase will receive a one-time $1000 in crypto as a part of the firm’s new program called CIkka – pronounced ‘sikka’.

The news comes after Coinbase announced that it’s working on an app store that will work like Apple’s App Store, for decentralized apps (DApps).

Even though the exchange is based out of Delaware in the United States, its team in India will be headed by independent directors. They will have the sovereignty to make decisions depending on the local requirements and context.

The company is ‘remote-first’. So, they are open to recruiting all over India and not just in Hyderabad where they’re setting up the office. They want to be as local as possible.

Additionally, the company hasn’t ruled out acquiring up and coming startups. Coinbase has asked interested founders to reach out to Gupta so that their ideas can be discussed further.