Every major financial shift in India has followed a familiar pattern. First comes hesitation, then gradual acceptance, and finally the realisation, sometimes uncomfortably late, that the rules of participation have already been written. It happened with equities in the nineties. It happened again with mutual funds and SIP investing. Digital assets are now at that same inflection point, and the past year has made one thing unmistakable: authorities are no longer treating crypto as a problem to manage at arm's length.
Across multiple parliamentary sessions in 2025 and early 2026, Members of Parliament have pushed pointed questions on how India is handling this space - from the crackdown on offshore platforms operating without local accountability, to the rising tax footprint of digital asset transactions, tighter onboarding norms for exchanges, the push toward a formal framework for real-world asset tokenisation, and the capacity being built within law enforcement to investigate crypto-linked financial crime. Taken together, these lines of enquiry paint a picture more complex than most public commentary suggests.
