Crypto

Inside India’s crypto revival: a maturing investment landscape despite regulatory ambiguity

Sohini Mitter

June 03, 2025 | 13 Min Read

India rode the post-Trump crypto rally in 2024, with trading volumes on top domestic exchanges multiplying significantly. Despite high taxation and overall scepticism, public interest in crypto has widened across age groups and geographies. The regulatory environment seems to be softening as well.

Key Takeaways

Even though crypto remains unrecognized as legal tender, India led the world in its global adoption last year, surpassing the US and other emerging economies
Seven of India's top 10 crypto hubs are in non-metro areas, signalling mainstream acceptance of the asset class. The average age of crypto investors has also gone up from 25 to 31, revealing a maturing demographic
Not just Bitcoins, seasoned investors are also redistributing capital to altcoins like Ethereum, Solana, and XRP for better returns
The FIU has started overseeing crypto exchanges in the country, indicating a move towards structured regulation in the sector in the near future

2024 wasn’t just a year of expansion for cryptocurrency, it also marked a series of groundbreaking events that redirected the course of the asset class in global finance.

Bitcoin soared past the remarkable $100,000 threshold, going on to become the fifth largest asset class; major institutional players like hedge funds and asset management companies embraced crypto with an unparalleled vigour, and the introduction of spot exchange traded funds (ETFs) for Bitcoin and Ethereum created new avenues for conventional—and even conservative—investors to join the new ‘digital gold’ rally.

In a historic first, the global crypto market cap also surpassed a staggering $3 trillion, thereby solidifying its status as a fundamental element in the world’s financial ecosystem. Add to that, the sovereign adoption of Bitcoin across Latin America coupled with increasing regulatory frameworks in APAC countries, and the growing legitimisation of the currency across the world, fuelled by US President Donald Trump’s pronounced pro-crypto stance, defined the year.

The post-Trump rally

India, too, was swept by the post-Trump Bitcoin rally starting November 2024, with trading volumes growing 4x-5x on top domestic crypto exchanges.

A whopping $1.9 billion was traded in the December quarter alone, with India topping the world in global crypto adoption—ahead of even the US and emerging economies—for the second successive year, according to a study by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

On homegrown crypto exchange CoinDCX, for instance, trading volumes for the three months post Trump’s re-election stood at $794 million, $995 million, and $815 million—a sharp rise from the average three-monthly trading volume of $206 million prior to that—according to CoinGecko, a global crypto tracking and analytics platform. CoinDCX’s SIP holders, too, have shot up 253.33% in the last one year.

On another leading Indian exchange ZebPay, meanwhile, daily trading volumes went up from $0.4 million on the day before Trump’s re-election (November 4) to $4.6 million exactly a month after that (December 4), indicates CoinGecko data. In essence, the Trump-fuelled global rally, among other things, expedited crypto’s revival in India.

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