When Coinbase reopened its doors to Indian users on June 1, 2026, more than three years after its abrupt 2022 exit, the launch was billed as the most consequential move by a global exchange into the world’s largest crypto market. What arrived instead, for many of the users who rushed to sign up in the first 48 hours, was a screen that read coming soon.
The stumble carried an echo. Coinbase’s first attempt at India in April 2022 unravelled within days, after the National Payments Corporation of India publicly distanced itself from the exchange’s use of UPI, forcing Coinbase to pause services almost as soon as they began. This time, the company had spent nearly a year building the plumbing to avoid a repeat, which made the “coming soon” wall all the more jarring for users who had waited since then.
One month on, Coinbase’s product head for India & EMEA, Roshan Prabhakar, is willing to say plainly what happened.
“I’ll be honest that we probably did not get all of it right,” Prabhakar told The Crypto Times in an exclusive interview. “A lot of users actually came in the moment when they saw the news and hit that coming soon stage, which they were not really expecting. And we honestly don’t want to wave that away.”
It is an unusually direct admission from a senior executive at a publicly listed exchange, and it sets the tone for a wide-ranging conversation about what Coinbase’s return to India actually looked like on the ground — the deposit failures, the withdrawal complaints, the KYC issues, and the deliberate strategic call that produced them.
A phased rollout, by design
Prabhakar is clear that the friction was not a matter of infrastructure failing under load. It was a choice.
“When you’re moving real money, what you cannot accept as a failure is deposit going wrong, funds moving where it should not move, etcetera, and so on and so forth,” he said. “So we kind of deliberately ramped up in stages instead of opening up the product to everyone on day one. This is almost a safety and security first strategy that we followed to make sure the launch is as clean as possible.”
The cost of that choice, he acknowledged, was real, and largely borne by users who had waited three years for this moment and did not read the fine print announcing a phased rollout.
“The biggest learning for us is that the first 48 hours was probably less about the product and more about the communication,” Prabhakar said. “We probably underestimated a bit on how visible a phased rollout would actually go externally. It was all there in the fine print in terms of it’s not live for everyone, we are rolling out. But probably that was too much of the fine print for users who were excited to get onboarded on day one.”
Over the following two weeks, Prabhakar said, the team “found out and fixed a handful of edge cases, bugs” — the kind of issues the phased rollout was designed to surface — and completed the ramp on schedule.
“The good news is that we completed that rollout on schedule as per the two weeks that we had planned,” he said. “Right now the product is fully available for all users in India.”
What was actually built, and why it took a year
Beneath the messy first fortnight sits a piece of infrastructure that, Prabhakar argues, is unlike anything a global crypto exchange has previously built for India.
Coinbase, he said, is “the only global exchange as of now that went fully onshore, starting from setting up a local entity and building direct INR rails on top of local bank accounts, and on top of local liquidity as well, rather than going through P2P or other intermediaries.”
That distinction matters in a market where much of the action has drifted the other way. India’s punishing tax regime has pushed an estimated 90% of the country’s crypto trading volume offshore, onto global platforms and grey-market rails, the very dynamic that Coinbase’s onshore, compliance-first model is built to reverse. The decision to build the plumbing rather than plug into it is what turned the launch from a matter of weeks into what Prabhakar described as “close to a year of work.”
“We have to integrate deeply with India’s payments stack, which genuinely is one of the best in the world,” Prabhakar said. “We have to work with multiple local banking partners and also work in and around what local banking partners can and cannot do. On top of that, we had to set up completely local order books as well.”
There was another layer, too: taxes. Every applicable trade on Coinbase India has to compute and withhold TDS and GST in rupees at the point of the trade, and produce records users can actually file with. “All of these are not something that we plug into at the end,” Prabhakar said. “A lot of these are capabilities that we build deep into the platform stack.”
The 30% tax and 1% TDS: Priced in, not papered over
For any exchange operating in India, the country’s now-notorious 30% income tax on crypto gains and 1% TDS on every trade is the elephant in the product room; the same friction that, as The Crypto Times has documented, has left Indians paying a persistent premium for crypto and driven the bulk of the market abroad. Prabhakar’s answer is that Coinbase has made a “deliberate choice not to hide the cost at all.”
“If you go through the Coinbase buying or selling experience, you’ll see that at the point of the trade, the user sees TDS, GST, all of it broken out as line items, the same way they see the platform fee component, spread, etcetera,” he said. “They’ll have info icons next to it that explain in plain language why the deduction is happening.”
The transparency, he argued, also does something regulators and users both benefit from: it flags cases where users are being taxed at higher rates than necessary. A user who has not linked their PAN with Aadhaar, for instance, is taxed at a materially higher TDS slab; something many users don’t realize until the deduction hits.
“We surface that information upfront so that it actually acts as a nudge for certain users to make that fix,” Prabhakar said. “It’s surprise that erodes trust, not really the cost. Indian users already know crypto is taxed here.”
The timing sharpens the stakes. Coinbase is scaling up at a moment when India’s regulatory posture remains firmly unresolved. On July 2, the Reserve Bank of India appeared before Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance for the first time specifically on virtual digital assets; and, according to committee chairman Bhartruhari Mahtab, did not recommend granting crypto legal status, holding the hard line the central bank has maintained since 2013. Tellingly, Mahtab also conceded that the RBI’s own digital rupee is “not a flourishing asset,” dwarfed by UPI. No policy changed at the sitting: the 30% tax stays, the 1% TDS stays, and crypto’s legal limbo — for a country of an estimated 119 million users, the world’s largest by adoption — stays with it.
For Coinbase, that is precisely the environment its compliance-native model is built for: a bet that, whichever way India’s rules eventually break, being fully onshore and tax-compliant is the safer side to be on.
The 12-month India bet
The most striking strategic claim to emerge from the interview is the one Coinbase has been quietly telegraphing: for the next 12 months, India is not one market among many. It is the market.
“In roadmap terms, it largely means that we go deep in India from an international perspective and spread thin across many more markets,” Prabhakar said.
The concrete pieces of that go-deep bet, he outlined, are: working towards UPI as a payment method, expanding INR spot trading to significantly more pairs than the launch supported, bringing serious-trader products including options to the platform, exploring the Coinbase for Business product for India, and continuing to invest in what he called “regulatory and infrastructure depth.”
Notably, some of what has been built for India is already flowing back out to Coinbase globally, a reversal of the usual direction of travel.
“The whole tax withholding machinery we have in India is genuinely new inside Coinbase, but there are more markets coming with similar constructs,” Prabhakar said. “What we’ve built has become the foundational layer for other markets. Another good example is our approach of building local order books — many other international markets are building on top of the foundation which the India team created.”
Safeguards, scams, and the closed-loop model
Asked about the specific fears Indian users bring to a crypto product, bank freezes, KYC delays, account fraud, scams, Prabhakar pointed to Coinbase India’s “INR closed-loop ecosystem” as the core defensive design.
“Money moves only between a user’s verified bank account and Coinbase bank account, and not anywhere else, at a user-by-user level,” he explained. Coinbase India is also onboarded to the Indian government’s I4C cybercrime portal, giving law enforcement a proper channel for legitimate queries around account freezes and complaints.
The exchange is also building redundancy across multiple banking partners to reduce single-point-of-failure risk; an implicit acknowledgment that even a compliance-first exchange in India is exposed to the banking sector’s willingness to work with crypto.
On scams, Prabhakar was frank that it is a moving target. “People on the other side also keep adapting. It’s almost like a cat and mouse game,” he said. Coinbase’s advantage, he argues, is being a global company: “Our risk systems are trained on scam patterns observed from across the globe. Controls that were developed to tackle a specific kind of scam pattern in market A easily become relevant for market B and market C.”
Stablecoins, UPI, and what actually competes
One of the more clarifying exchanges in the interview came around the frequently-asked question of whether stablecoins will eventually eat UPI’s lunch: a live debate in a country whose homegrown payments rail now processes upward of 24,000 crore transactions a year.
Prabhakar’s answer was unambiguous: no.
“I don’t think stablecoins at any point of time compete with UPI. UPI is one of the best domestic payment systems in the world, and it enabled all of us Indians to move money in an extremely fast and cheap manner,” he said. “Nothing is going to change that.”
Where stablecoins do belong, in his framing, is as “an invisible infrastructure layer that can enable global money movement” — settlement between systems, cross-border flows, and programmability that legacy rails like SWIFT don’t offer. “Both of these are going to be complementary constructs in the future,” he said.
The measure of success, one year out
Asked what would convince him personally that the India strategy had worked, Prabhakar offered a benchmark that is both modest and telling.
“If a year down the line, if we see that Coinbase is where the serious Indian trader or investor chooses to come on board and trust their money with — I think that’s a win for us,” he said. “If you ask the question ‘where do Indians trade?’ a year down the line, and the most credible answer is Coinbase, then that’s a win for us.”
He was explicit that this is not a sign-up-numbers race. “We want to be less focused at this point of time in terms of immediate sign-up numbers or activation numbers. What we want to see over the next 12 months is an engaged, active trader base who keep coming back, who trust Coinbase with their real money because the product and the compliance are both solid.”
For a launch that spent its first two weeks answering complaints instead of celebrating traction, it is a deliberate reframe: the scoreboard Coinbase India wants to be judged on is not the one that lit up on June 1, but the one that will be read on June 1, 2027.
Whether Indian users, many of whom have already used and abandoned half a dozen platforms since 2022, are willing to give an exchange twelve months of patience is a different question. Prabhakar seems to know it.
“It’s just day one for us,” he said, “and a lot of work is still to be done.”
Also Read: Exclusive: Coinbase Says No Other International Launch For 12 Months, India Is the Bet
