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. Through 2025 and into early 2026, formal notices went out to 52 offshore crypto platforms, and their access to Indian users was cut off. These platforms had built large user bases while staying outside the country's compliance perimeter. They observed lighter KYC checks, no FIU registration, and effectively zero obligation to follow local tax rules. The cost savings let them price more aggressively than regulated domestic exchanges, which sounds like a consumer benefit until you ask what happens when something goes wrong on a platform answerable to no Indian authority.The numbers running alongside this enforcement story are striking. TDS collections from digital asset transactions touched ₹511 crore in FY 2024-25, up sharply from ₹221 crore just two years earlier. Income tax declared on VDA transfers climbed from ₹269 crore in FY 2022-23 to ₹437 crore in FY 2023-24 - figures that will only grow once FY 2024-25 filing data comes in. The CBDT ran a focused campaign that identified over 44,000 users with compliance gaps. Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate has attached or frozen proceeds of crime worth over ₹4,200 crore across crypto-related cases. These numbers reflect a maturing market that is steadily becoming an integral part of India's broader financial ecosystem.What is also changing, beyond scale, is the character of participation. The investor entering crypto today looks quite different from the one chasing returns in 2021. There is more interest in allocation logic, i.e. how digital assets sit alongside gold or equities in a longer-term portfolio, and considerably less appetite for the kind of leveraged, cycle-driven trading that defined earlier retail waves. The onboarding bar has been raised considerably too. Since January 2026, no account goes live until the platform has pulled a biometric selfie with liveness detection, logged geo-tagged coordinates, and confirmed a Re.1 bank transaction from the user. From April 2026, specified reporting entities will be required to furnish detailed user-level transaction data directly to the Income Tax Department under the newly inserted Section 509. The infrastructure of oversight is being built in real timeFor active traders, the conversation has evolved too. Crypto's structural advantages (continuous markets, global liquidity, capital efficiency in derivatives) have always been real. What is different now is that serious participants ask harder questions about execution quality, platform reliability, and margining mechanics rather than chasing headline leverage. The platforms earning lasting trust are the ones investing in those fundamentals.Of all the regulatory moves worth tracking, the Asset Tokenisation Regulation Bill tabled in March 2026 stands out. It puts a legal structure around the tokenisation of real-world assets such as land, commodities, and infrastructure projects on blockchain rails. That alone indicates that the conversation in Parliament has quietly shifted. The question is no longer whether this technology has a place inside the formal financial system. What is now being worked out is how exactly it fits in, and on what terms.India has trained over 13,800 law enforcement personnel in digital forensics. Onboarding standards have been tightened far beyond what existed even a year ago. The direction of travel is not ambiguous. The debate is no longer about whether digital assets have a place in India's financial future. It is about what role India chooses to play in shaping how that future gets built - for its own citizens and, given the country's scale, for much of the world watching closely.This article is authored by Sumit Gupta, Co-Founder, CoinDCX.You must be at least 18 years old to access this site.Disclaimer: Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions. The above content is non-editorial, and TIL hereby disclaims any and all warranties, expressed or implied, relating to the same. 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