The first attempt lasted three days. In May 2022, Coinbase launched UPI payment support in India and suspended it within 72 hours after the National Payments Corporation of India issued a public notice signalling regulatory disapproval. CEO Brian Armstrong attributed what followed to informal pressure from the Reserve Bank of India. The exchange exited Indian operations entirely before returning in December 2025 through registration with the country’s Financial Intelligence Unit. Monday’s announcement converts that compliance re-entry into a fully functioning consumer product available at scale. YourNewsClub flags the four-year gap between the 2022 collapse and this week’s full launch as the most instructive data point in the story – the duration of that path communicates more about what India’s crypto regulatory environment required than any single policy statement.
Starting June 1, 2026, Indian users can deposit and withdraw rupees directly from their bank accounts through the Immediate Payment Service, known as IMPS – one of the country’s most widely used real-time interbank payment systems. Coinbase has established dedicated INR order books that allow local users to trade directly in rupees without converting first through stablecoins or other intermediary assets. The exchange has also rolled out perpetual futures contracts covering major crypto assets, giving Indian traders access to leveraged instruments that regional competitors have used aggressively to build volume over the past two years. John O’Loghlen, Coinbase’s regional managing director for Asia Pacific, said the company is in India for the long term and has invested meaningfully in the local ecosystem. YourNewsClub notes that O’Loghlen’s statement tracks a deliberate shift in Coinbase’s public posture toward Asia since the FIU registration closed in December 2025.
YourNewsClub puts the addressable market at the top of the watchlist. Consulting firm Imarc estimated the Indian cryptocurrency market at $3.04 billion in 2025 and projected expansion to $14.21 billion by 2034, at a compound annual growth rate of 18.66%. Chainalysis ranked India first globally in its 2025 Crypto Adoption Index across all income categories. Those numbers make India not just a large market but arguably the single highest-conviction expansion opportunity for a global exchange seeking growth outside saturated Western markets. Domestic exchanges CoinDCX and WazirX held market share throughout Coinbase’s two-year absence and built local brand recognition and user retention that a returning international platform must overcome even with superior regulatory standing and infrastructure quality.
Freddy Camacho, who studies the political economy of computation and control over capital flows, frames the compliance logic directly: “Coinbase clearing FIU registration before launching IMPS rails is the correct operational sequence. In a market where regulators shut down payment access without formal notice in 2022, the compliance relationship is not a cost – it is the strategic asset. Whoever controls the regulatory relationship in India’s crypto market controls the on-ramp, and on-ramp control in a high-growth-adoption market compounds meaningfully over time.” The IMPS infrastructure Camacho describes is precisely what Monday’s launch delivers.
The cleanest takeaway is this: direct INR rails make Coinbase the only major international exchange currently running bank-to-crypto transfers at meaningful scale inside India. That advantage is structural rather than transient, because replicating it requires competitors to complete their own FIU registration and certify equivalent IMPS connectivity – a process measured in quarters, not weeks. Peer-to-peer workarounds, which Indian users on global platforms had long relied on, carried real scam risk and bank-account-freeze exposure that direct regulated rails now eliminate. Your News Club spoke with India Product Lead Akshay Chugh this week, who called India one of the most important markets globally for developer talent, trading volume, and blockchain adoption and said all the pieces are in place.
The open question is pace: how quickly INR-denominated volumes migrate from domestic platforms to Coinbase’s newly established order books, and whether the FIU registration framework holds stable as Indian regulators continue building out their crypto compliance architecture. YourNewsClub will follow both metrics through Q3 2026.