Why is Coinbase betting big on India for the next 18-24 months? APAC MD John O’Loghlen explains

U.S.-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is making India its biggest international growth bet, despite the country’s high crypto taxes and regulatory uncertainty.

“Our executive team and board of directors have made a decision to prioritise India as our number one international market for the next 18 to 24 months,” John O’Loghlen, Managing Director, APAC, Coinbase, told Fortune India in an exclusive interview.

The renewed push comes after Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, halted its services in India in 2023. It resumed crypto trading last year after registering with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), bringing its operations onshore and under India’s anti-money laundering framework.

“We’re fully onshore now. We have a completely new platform built for India that complies with Indian taxation, FIU and other legal requirements,” O’Loghlen said.

India remains a difficult market for crypto exchanges. Digital-asset gains attract a 30% tax, losses cannot generally be offset against other income, and a 1% tax deducted at source on transactions has weighed on trading activity.

Yet Coinbase is betting on the market’s scale. India has more than 1.4 billion people and an estimated 100 million crypto owners, making it a key market for global digital-asset firms.

Coinbase has already been putting money behind its India thesis. Its venture arm recently increased its investment in Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX at a valuation of $2.45 billion, building on Coinbase Ventures’ earlier investments in the company.

The company is also expanding its India workforce, which has crossed 500 employees, across local and global product and technology operations.

From crypto exchange to 'everything exchange'

The company’s India strategy goes beyond spot crypto trading. Coinbase plans to build an “everything exchange” offering crypto, derivatives, equities and tokenised assets under one roof.

“We want to offer consumers and Indian users whatever they would like to trade under one roof,” O’Loghlen said.

The roadmap includes perpetuals, options, derivatives, traditional equities and tokenised equities, subject to local regulations. Coinbase also plans to offer tokenised equities on its India app, citing strong demand for access to U.S. stocks.

“There’s very real demand here for access to U.S. equities, whether they’re traditional equities or tokenised equities,” he said.

UPI is also on Coinbase’s roadmap for this year. O’Loghlen said stablecoins would complement, rather than compete with, India’s real-time payments infrastructure.

The company plans to roll out new products at a steady pace, with announcements roughly every month to six weeks.

Bets on stablecoins, AI-powered commerce

Coinbase’s longer-term India bet is also tied to two areas it believes could drive the next phase of crypto adoption: stablecoins and agentic commerce.

“The next wave of growth, in my view, is agentic commerce and remittances around stablecoins,” O’Loghlen said.

He expects AI-powered bots and advisors to increasingly participate in e-commerce and trading. “Within 12 to 18 months, we could see significant amounts of e-commerce activity and trading activity being driven by bots and advisors,” he said.

Stablecoins, he believes, could become particularly important for cross-border payments and remittances because they enable programmable and near-instant settlement. For a country such as India, which has one of the world’s largest overseas migrant populations and remittance flows, that could create a significant opportunity.

Coinbase is also closely watching India's evolving approach to stablecoins and digital-asset regulation. O’Loghlen said the company is regularly engaging with Indian regulators and sharing lessons from jurisdictions where crypto frameworks are already being developed.

“India is aware it can't hide from stablecoins or avoid stablecoins. It has to work out how to develop a framework or policy,” he said.

While the regulatory framework remains uncertain, Coinbase believes the direction of travel is changing. “The industry hasn't been shut down, and we have confidence that over time there will be a roadmap here,” O’Loghlen said.