Chainalysis: India exchanges capture 0.7% of crypto inflows

Chainalysis reports that India-based users sent $88.4 billion to centralized cryptocurrency exchanges during its annual reporting window, while exchanges headquartered in India received 0.7% of that inflow.

The figures appear in Chainalysis’s regional publications, with the Central, South and Southeast Asia and Oceania chapter released on Sept. 30 and the Latin America chapter on Sept. 23. The firm’s main annual window runs from July 2025 through June 2026, and the chapters describe activity that ends before October. The 0.7% figure measures the share of value received by India-based exchanges in Chainalysis’s exchange inflows analysis; it does not measure trades executed on those platforms, revenue or customer counts.

Chainalysis reports that India’s domestic share fell from roughly 7% to 0.7% after mid-2022. By contrast, Brazil-based exchanges increased their share of inflows from about 1.5% to 12.5% over a similar period. The firm assigns pooled service activity to user countries using website traffic and adjusts those traffic shares for income differences using the square root of GDP per capita. Chainalysis also notes that removing VPN and bot traffic is imperfect and describes the numbers as estimates with built-in uncertainty.

Indian tax rules are one factor industry participants identify as relevant to where users send funds. Current law requires a 1% withholding on consideration paid for a transfer of a virtual digital asset to a resident, deducted at the earlier of credit or payment. In practice, a cash sale of ₹100,000 with the standard 1% deduction would leave the seller with ₹99,000 immediately available; the ₹1,000 withheld is claimed as a credit when filing returns.

Exemptions apply for certain taxpayers. Eligible individuals and Hindu undivided families may be exempt up to ₹50,000 in aggregate consideration per tax year under specified turnover limits, while other payers have a ₹10,000 threshold. The statutory obligation to deduct belongs to the responsible payer, and the deductee can seek a refund or credit when filing a return.

CoinSwitch co-founder Ashish Singhal suggested that withholding requirements can encourage use of offshore platforms if those venues do not apply the same deductions. Chainalysis cautions that the extent to which withholding drove the decline in domestic captured value has not been measured; foreign platforms may comply with Indian obligations and platform location alone does not guarantee exemption.

Payment access and liquidity routes are additional factors. Indian platforms commonly accept deposits through UPI and net banking, while Brazilian platforms often use Pix and TED. International exchanges sometimes integrate these local payment rails; Chainalysis notes that some global venues document BRL and other local-currency deposit paths. For corporate and institutional flows, interviewees described use of stablecoins for liquidity and cross-border transfers, which can route demand to platforms beyond retail trading.

Chainalysis attributes $88.4 billion in centralized-exchange inflows to India-based users for its annual period and reports that Brazil’s broader crypto economy recorded $252.5 billion in activity in the year ending June 30, despite a 1.6% contraction. The firm says that combining inflows with domestic exchange shares using matching time windows and consistent platform samples would be required to produce an annual dollar estimate of value captured by domestic exchanges.

The report frames the country comparisons as descriptive and does not claim causal links between specific policies or market features and the reported shares. Chainalysis describes the exchange-share calculations as estimated allocations of activity rather than precise measures of each platform’s market share.