Radhika Gupta, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, has told retail investors in India to steer clear of cryptocurrency, arguing that the country still lacks the regulatory, tax and investor protection scaffolding needed to make digital assets a safe wealth-creation tool for households.
Answering a question at the India Today Woman Summit 2026 on whether cryptocurrency belongs in a wealth-creation portfolio, Gupta gave a three-word reply, “Don’t buy crypto,” before elaborating that her problem is geographical rather than ideological. “I have no problem with crypto. I have a problem with crypto in India,” she said, according to the original report by India Today.
Regulatory Vacuum At The Heart Of The Warning
Gupta, who runs one of the country’s largest asset management firms and is a frequent voice on retail investor education, framed her caution around one central question: what happens to an Indian investor when things go wrong on a crypto platform?
“But in India, why would you invest when you have no resort to go to if something goes wrong?” she asked, drawing a sharp contrast with jurisdictions such as the United States, where she said her answer might be different if she were sitting on a stage there.
That question lands at a sensitive moment for the sector. India still does not have a dedicated cryptocurrency law, and the long-awaited government discussion paper on virtual digital assets was reportedly shelved earlier this year again after the Reserve Bank of India objected to legitimizing the sector through a formal framework. Successive deferrals since 2024 have left retail participants operating in a grey zone where taxation exists, but statutory investor protection does not.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by BJP MP Bhartruhari Mahtab, has been trying to close that gap. In its 36th Report on the Securities Markets Code, 2025, the panel recommended a phased crypto regulatory framework built on Self-Regulatory Organisations under SEBI or RBI oversight, a position that echoed testimony gathered when the committee heard the RBI and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India on VDAs on July 2, 2026. Nothing on the ground has changed yet.
The Tax Burden Backdrop
Gupta’s caution also lands against one of the harshest tax regimes for digital assets anywhere in the world. Union Budget 2026 left the framework untouched, retaining the flat 30% tax on gains from Virtual Digital Assets under Section 115BBH of the Income-tax Act, the 1% TDS on transfers under Section 194S, and the rule that crypto losses cannot be set off against gains from other crypto assets or any other income head.
For investors in the highest bracket, the effective burden, once surcharge, cess, and the 18% GST on exchange fees are factored in, can cross 42%. From April 1, 2026, new penalty provisions also kicked in, with reporting entities facing a fine of Rs 200 per day for failure to file crypto transaction statements and a flat Rs 50,000 penalty for incorrect reporting.
Cross-border data sharing under the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework is scheduled to begin from April 1, 2027, further tightening the visibility loop for Indian tax authorities.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes has since released a guidance note shifting the bulk of transaction reporting onto exchanges, a change welcomed by industry as a compliance relief but one that does nothing to answer the investor recourse concern Gupta raised at the summit.
“Don’t Invest In What You Don’t Understand”
Gupta’s second line of argument was a classical one from the mutual fund school of investing, familiar to anyone who has followed her commentary on X or her book Limitless.
She recounted a family anecdote about an uncle who wanted to buy crypto but could not articulate why when she asked him. That inability, in her view, is itself a signal to stop. Popularity, she cautioned, is not the same as comprehension, and the fact that everyone at a dinner table appears to be minting money from an asset does not mean any of them understands the underlying token, the risks embedded in it or how the exit will work when sentiment turns.
“Don’t buy things you don’t understand,” she said, pushing the audience toward a habit rather than a product view.
The counsel is timely. India ranks first globally on Chainalysis’s grassroots crypto adoption index, and independent estimates put Indian retail exposure to digital assets in the region of $4.5 billion, a figure the government itself has cited while arguing that the sector is not yet systemic. A large slice of that exposure sits in the hands of first-time investors who came in through the last bull cycle.
The Thali Portfolio Analogy
The crypto warning was not delivered in isolation. Gupta wove it into a broader case for boring, diversified investing, which she compared to an Indian thali built out of equity, debt and gold, each serving a distinct role rather than competing to be the flashiest item on the plate. Mutual funds, she added, are the “financial food court” where investors can pick according to appetite for risk rather than reach for the loudest dish.
The message, in effect, was the opposite of chasing the next big thing. High-return stories, Gupta argued, are not a substitute for understanding the product and being clear about what recourse exists when the trade goes bad.
Where The Regulatory Debate Stands
The regulatory backdrop to Gupta’s remarks is unusually unsettled. SEBI has been open to a multi-regulator model, with the market regulator supervising exchanges and security-like tokens, the RBI handling cross-border flows, and the Finance Ministry setting policy and tax.
The Reserve Bank has stayed publicly hostile to private crypto, with Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar calling the asset class a “pure gamble” in December 2025 and Governor Sanjay Malhotra urging global central banks to prioritise CBDCs over stablecoins.
That stance sits behind the central bank’s April 2026 circular expanding offshore reporting of INR derivative trades, a move analysts read as part of a wider transparency push aimed at boxing in crypto and non-deliverable forward markets.
The Asset Tokenisation (Regulation) Bill, 2026, introduced in the Rajya Sabha by AAP MP Raghav Chadha, has meanwhile attempted to open a parallel legislative track for tokenised real-world assets, though it does not directly address retail crypto trading.
Until either a statutory framework or a formal SRO structure lands, the recourse question Gupta flagged remains open. An Indian investor who loses funds to an exchange collapse, a hack or a mis-sold token today does not have a dedicated grievance redress path comparable to the one that exists for stocks under SEBI or for bank deposits under the RBI’s ombudsman system.
The Takeaway For Retail
Gupta was careful to note that her position is not a prediction that every crypto trade will lose money. Her point, distilled, is that Indian investors should be especially cautious about deploying capital into an asset they do not understand, in a market where the safety net they assume exists may not actually be there.
For a fund industry CEO with a large retail following, the phrasing was deliberately blunt, and it lands at a point in the cycle when SIP flows into mutual funds are hitting fresh highs each month even as crypto exchanges continue to fight for a permanent legal identity. Whether the message reshapes retail behaviour will depend less on Gupta’s summit soundbite and more on how quickly Parliament, the RBI and SEBI can close the regulatory gap she just put a spotlight on.
