India’s first “exchange” launched somewhere in 2012.
No order book. No custody. Just P2P OTC via forum posts.
By 2018, we had ~5.5M users and billions in on-ramp/off-ramp volume.
Then RBI nuked fiat rails.
Most thought the market would rug.
It didn’t. It re-routed.
👉 KYC’d exchanges lost banking overnight
👉 Unflagged platforms bootstrapped new fiat channels
👉 Users migrated en masse to whoever could process INR
👉 Market cap didn't drop - market share shifted
This wasn’t about superior infra or product.
This was a regulatory latency trade.
A temporary edge that reshuffled the entire leaderboard.
OGs lawfared. Some pivoted to crypto - only pairs.
Others ragequit and moved ops offshore.
But the signal was clear:
Demand was sticky. Liquidity was resilient. Builders kept shipping.
Fast forward to now -
Spot is commoditized. Options and perpetuals lead.
Retail’s sophisticated. Institutions lurking.
India’s crypto stack evolved under constraint.
Not despite it - because of it.
Chopped it up with @AjeetK of @reflexical on alpha un#.
One of the most candid convos on India’s regulatory arbitrage era.
Full episode at:
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