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The crypto sector in India is going through a transformation, with the get-rich-quick impulse of the young investors five years ago increasingly giving way to a more mature, systematic, and long-term attitude towards crypto investments. And this change can best be seen in the rise of a new type of crypto product: crypto Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs).
The crypto space in India is still unregulated and so finding official industry-wide data is impossible. However, each of the three of the largest crypto exchanges that The Hindu has spoken to have reported rapid growth in the adoption of crypto SIPs.
This shift does not involve small amounts either. According to calculations based on government data, more than ₹51,000 crore worth of crypto investments took place in India in 2024-25, the latest year for which there is data. By all accounts, this figure has grown significantly since then, and an increasing share is being routed through the SIP route.
Further, crypto SIPs are not a phenomenon limited to India’s metros. In fact, most of the activity is coming from Tier-II and Tier-III cities and, as one crypto exchange put it, even from “Tier 10 cities”.
Rapid growth
“According to CoinDCX, around 20% of the people that were earlier investing in single crypto assets such as <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/blackrock-bitcoin-etf-pulls-269-3m-in-best-day-since-march/” title=”BlackRock Bitcoin ETF Pulls $269.3M in Best Day Since March”>Bitcoin are now instead choosing crypto SIPs. This share was just 2-3%, or maximum 4%, as recently as nine months ago,” Mridul Gupta, Founding Partner of CoinDCX said.
Mr. Gupta pointed out how the current cohort of crypto investors choosing crypto SIPs is qualitatively different from those from five years ago when India experienced a crypto boom.
“Five years ago, we used to see a lot of sentiment around crypto for investing in tokens that were slightly new, slightly low priced, and being talked about in the social channels by influencers or in general in social media,” Mr. Gupta said. “Now we see the form of investment has changed from one-time buys to SIPs.”
“We see a lot of disciplined investment from a more mature audience now versus a GenZ kind of an audience,” he added. “In the last 3-6 months, our daily SIP creation at an absolute level has also gone up by 50-60%. It’s increasing at that pace every quarter or so.”
According to Prateek Gupta, Head of Business at Mudrex, over the last 12-18 months, the company has seen the Assets Under Management (AUM) through the SIP route grow almost 220% or nearly 3x.
Balaji Srihari, vice-president of the India Business at CoinSwitch also attested to the rapid growth in the SIP category.
“Between 2023-24 and 2025-26, active SIP users grew by around 75%, while the number of active SIPs increased by approximately 93%,” Mr. Srihari said. “Annual SIP inflows nearly doubled over the same period, and cumulative capital deployed through the SIP route rose by about 144%.”
He added that this trend intensified in particular in 2025-26, with active SIP users growing nearly 39% year-on-year and annual SIP inflows increasing by around 63%.
Long-term thinking
“This SIP trend has been so great in India in general,” Mr. Gupta of CoinDCX said. “Because people don’t want to time when they are investing, they don’t want to time the financial markets. They want to hedge the risk and be consistent and more disciplined in their investments. And that’s what we are really seeing pick up.”
He added that the cohort of crypto SIPs investors have a strong overlap with people who have already been investing systematically in mutual funds, gold, and even in stocks.
The way this works, Mr. Gupta from Mudrex explained, is a little different from how a normal autopay works in a mutual fund. For example, a user can deposit a bulk amount of ₹1 lakh on any crypto platform and set up a monthly SIP of ₹10,000 that will be debited from that amount every month. The corresponding crypto asset purchased each month will be deposited in the user’s wallet each month.
So, users not only accumulate crypto assets over time, but they benefit from any price increase that happens over this period.
“I think investors are figuring out that, as long as you are fundamentally bullish on a medium to long term basis on any asset, it is immaterial what your entry point is,” he explained.
Moving past youth & metros
According to CoinSwitch, the 26-35 years age group forms the largest segment of crypto SIP users, accounting for roughly 42-44% of users. Those aged 36-45 years account for around 28-31%, followed by the 18-25 years group at about 14-16%. Users aged 46 years and above represent roughly 12-13%.
“Around 17% of users are from Tier-1 cities, while approximately 31% are from Tier-2 cities and 52% are from Tier-3 cities,” Mr. Srihari added. “In other words, more than 80% of crypto SIP users come from non-metro markets, underlining the depth of adoption beyond large urban centres.” Both Mudrex and CoinDCX pointed to the same trend.
“You would be surprised by the kind of cities that we see a lot of participation from,” Mr. Gupta of Mudrex said. “They are not even like Tier 2, they are Tier 10! Even in small cities, people there are smart investors and want to be smart with their investment. People want to diversify their portfolio across multiple asset classes.”
According to CoinDCX, its crypto SIP users are heavily concentrated in the 27-28 years to 37-38 years category.
“This is very different from five years ago,” Mr. Gupta of CoinDCX said. “The 2021 crypto boom was largely led by the very young generation, the GenZ generation at that point in time, and a lot of speculation was there.”
What this means for regulation
“I think India’s regulatory approach will increasingly have to recognise that crypto has moved beyond a single use-case or investor profile,” Mr. Srihari said. “You now have long-term holders, active traders, exchanges, custodians and blockchain businesses, each presenting very different regulatory questions.”
“The government, therefore, has an opportunity to build an activity-based framework, where the intensity of oversight corresponds to the underlying risk, rather than putting the entire asset class into one regulatory bucket,” he added.
India’s regulatory bodies, however, remain less-than-keen to enter the crypto space. While they have not officially commented on the changing nature of crypto investments in India, officials have privately put forth their thoughts.
“We have been looking at crypto and the changes happening, but until the government decided whether it wants to classify cryptos as currencies or assets, there is little that we can do on this,” a senior official in the Securities and Exchange Board of India told The Hindu.
Officials in the Reserve Bank of India, too, said they have not changed their restrictive stance on private cryptos and their use in India.
Source: www.thehindu.com