Crypto Taxes India: What You Need to Know About Reporting and Compliance

When you buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrency in India, you’re not just participating in a new financial system—you’re creating a taxable event, a transaction that triggers legal reporting obligations under Indian income tax law. Also known as crypto income, these events are treated like any other capital gain or business income, and the Income Tax Department has been actively tracking them since 2022. The rules are clear: every trade, every swap, every airdrop you claim counts. Even if you didn’t convert crypto to rupees, you still owe tax.

There’s no gray area here. If you bought Bitcoin for ₹50,000 and sold it for ₹75,000, you made a ₹25,000 profit—and that’s taxable at 30%. No deductions, no exemptions. The government doesn’t care if you used Binance, WazirX, or a peer-to-peer app. If it happened, it’s recorded. And if you got tokens for free—like from a airdrop, a distribution of crypto tokens to wallet holders, often as a marketing tactic or community reward. Also known as free crypto, it’s treated as income at fair market value when received—you pay tax on that value the moment it lands in your wallet. Same goes for staking rewards. Every rupee earned from locking up your coins is income.

What about losses? You can’t offset crypto losses against other income like salary or business profits. You can only use them to reduce gains from other crypto trades in the same financial year. And if you didn’t file? The government now has tools to match wallet addresses with bank transactions, and exchanges are required to report user data. Last year, over 1.2 million Indians received notices from the tax department asking for crypto transaction records.

Keeping records isn’t optional—it’s your only defense. You need dates, amounts, transaction IDs, and the rupee value at the time of every trade. Many people use free tools to track this, but the IRS-style rules in India mean you can’t just guess. If you’re audited, your spreadsheet better match what the exchange sent to the government.

There’s no way around it: crypto in India is regulated, tracked, and taxed. The conversation isn’t whether you should pay—it’s how you pay correctly. The posts below show real cases: what got people in trouble, how others avoided penalties, and what’s still unclear after three years of rules. You’ll find breakdowns of recent notices, how to report staking, what happens if you ignore it, and which exchanges actually share data with the tax department. This isn’t theory. It’s what’s happening right now.