How India Revamped Its Crypto Industry in 2025: 49 Exchanges Registered, $3.1M in Fines Issued, Here's What's Next

Key Takeaways

• In 2025, 49 crypto exchanges registered with India’s FIU, including 45 section and 4 offshore platforms.

• The FIU imposed fines totaling astir $3.1 cardinal connected non-compliant exchanges, with large penalties levied against platforms similar Bybit.

• The overhaul cracked down connected illicit activities, blocked unregistered offshore sites, and paved the mode for safer, regulated crypto trading successful India.

After years of uncertainty, India’s crypto marketplace yet received what it had agelong lacked successful 2025: a wide regulatory spine.

What had existed for overmuch of the past decennary arsenic a gray-zone industry—neither afloat banned nor formally recognized—was pulled into a defined compliance framework.

The effect was 1 of India’s astir consequential crypto argumentation shifts to date, reshaping however exchanges operate, however users trade, and however authorities enforce the rules.

At the halfway of the overhaul was the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which moved decisively to registry platforms, penalize violations, and asseverate oversight implicit the world’s largest crypto hub.

India’s attack to the crypto manufacture has ever been cautious, but 2025 marked a turning point, wherever regularisation shifted from sporadic enforcement to a full-fledged framework.

In 2025, the FIU, nether the country’s Finance Ministry, took complaint of the crypto ecosystem, imposing a caller registration mandate and levying hefty fines connected violators.

The fiscal watchdog imposed caller rules aimed astatine cracking down connected wealth laundering and different shady activities.

Crypto work providers were brought nether the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002.

Registered platforms were required to taxable suspicious transaction reports, name compliance officers, behaviour interior audits, and surface transactions against sanctions lists.

Wallet monitoring, scrutiny of token launches, and oversight of transfers betwixt hosted and unhosted wallets person were besides made portion of regular compliance.

For regulators, the purpose was straightforward: trim the risks of wealth laundering, panic financing, and fraud without shutting the doorway connected morganatic crypto activity.

For exchanges, the displacement resulted successful heavier operational costs and tighter controls—but besides regulatory legitimacy.

The effect of the FIU’s reign was exceptional.

By March 2025, a full of 49 crypto exchanges had registered with the regulator—45 based successful India and 4 operating offshore.

Alongside registrations came enforcement.

The FIU levied penalties totaling astir ₹28 crore (about $3.1 million) against exchanges recovered successful usurpation of anti-money laundering (AML) and reporting requirements.