The Bitcoin Beacon
The country with the world’s biggest grassroots bitcoin market moved to block fifteen unregistered platforms — and pushed its buyers further into peer-to-peer.
NEW DELHI — India’s Financial Intelligence Unit has ordered the removal of apps and web addresses belonging to fifteen offshore exchanges, saying they served Indian customers without registering under the country’s anti-money-laundering law. The unit, known as FIU-IND, said Tuesday that the non-compliance notices were issued under Section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
The named platforms are Weex, Blofin, Rezorex, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, XT.com, Latoken, WOO X, Pionex, ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, Fixedfloat, WhiteBIT and Guardarian — a group of mostly small and mid-sized exchanges and swap services. Alongside the notices, FIU-IND asked that their applications and URLs be taken down under powers linked to Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act.
India has done this before. In December 2023 it issued show-cause notices to nine larger offshore exchanges — Binance, KuCoin, Huobi, Kraken, Gate.io, Bittrex, Bitstamp, MEXC and Bitfinex — and moved to block their websites and app-store listings. Most eventually complied. Binance registered in August 2024 after a seven-month restriction and a penalty of 188.2 million rupees, about $2.25 million at the time. Bybit later paid 92.7 million rupees and registered too.
The rule that snares them is simple: since March 2023, any business offering crypto-to-fiat exchange, transfers or custody to Indian users must register with FIU-IND as a reporting entity, whether or not it has an office in the country. Physical presence is irrelevant. Serve Indians, follow Indian record-keeping and reporting rules, or be treated as operating illegally.
India is, by most grassroots-adoption rankings, the largest bitcoin market on earth. It got there the hard way. New Delhi taxes crypto gains at a flat 30% and skims a 1% levy off qualifying transactions at the source — punishing enough that traders long ago drifted to offshore venues, private wallets and peer-to-peer deals that the tax and the takedown alike struggle to see.
The workarounds keep multiplying. The Economic Times reported days ago that some Indians are moving stablecoins to gift-card services based in Sweden, Germany and Singapore, then spending the balances at home on groceries, fuel and gold — without ever touching a domestic exchange. In June, FIU-IND had already sought records of over-the-counter transactions above $10,000 from at least three major platforms, reaching back to January.
Block the app and you close a door. You do not close the trade between two people who each hold their own keys.
That is the tension at the center of the enforcement. A regulator can pull a listing from an app store and choke an exchange’s Indian traffic. It cannot pull a private key, and it cannot stand between two people settling a bitcoin trade directly. Every squeeze on the custodial on-ramps is also, quietly, an argument for self-custody — the one venue no takedown notice can reach.
FIU-IND paired its action with a warning to the public that crypto products and NFTs remain unregulated in India and carry no recourse if funds are lost. The caution is fair. So is its limit: the state can protect people from a fraudulent exchange, but the promise that drew Indians to bitcoin in the first place was never the exchange.
Why it matters: the world’s biggest grassroots bitcoin market is being pushed off custodial rails by its own government — and the only rail left is the one built to need no permission.
Named platforms, the Section 13 PMLA notices and the app/URL takedown request per FIU-IND’s Sept 9, 2026 release and reporting the same day. Penalty and registration figures for Binance and Bybit per prior FIU-IND actions (2023–2024). Informational only — not financial advice.
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