Crypto Futures driving 70-80% trading volumes, say Indian exchanges

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Crypto perpetual futures, introduced by most Indian exchanges less than a year ago, are gaining traction, making up nearly 70–80 percent of overall trading volumes compared with spot market amid an ongoing global crypto boom.

Several key exchanges including CoinSwitch, CoinDCX, Mudrex, Giottus, Delta Exchange who have launched this product, have also been competing on offering lower fees and INR-based futures trading options.

Similar to the equities market, a crypto futures contract is a financial agreement between two parties to buy or sell tokens at a specific price and time in the future. These contracts are priced based on a forward-looking market price and sentiments around an underlying asset or crypto token. It comes with a specific expiration date and can be settled physically or financially.

Perpetual futures, on the other hand, are designed to trade close to the underlying asset price, and doesn’t need to be settled or given an expiration date. It can be held indefinitely.

Industry experts highlighted that the biggest benefit of opting for crypto F&O (futures and options) is that derivatives are not taxed in India, letting traders to invest in futures for the long haul – surpassing the 30 percent virtual digital asset tax on profits and the 1 percent TDS deducted on every spot trade transaction of Rs 10,000 and above.

Edul Patel, Co-founder and CEO, Mudrex said that the biggest attraction for traders to invest in futures is the leverage offered on a wide range of crypto tokens depending on their underlying value and risk involved. At Mudrex, this leverage set on token prices can be 25X and even go as high as 100X.

Crypto F&O, just like equities, lets the investor trade in large sum by leveraging, while not actually needing to have that much money in their account for taking a position.

“The leverage is the key factor driving trading volumes despite the number of customers actually opting for F&O are much lower than spot trading. The trading volumes for futures is 4-5X higher than spot trading on Mudrex. Even globally for platforms like Binance, Bitcoin Futures is 10X larger than Bitcoin spot trades,” Patel told Moneycontrol.

To be sure, the higher trading volumes for futures include the leverage at which the future contracts are being pegged at.

The option of futures

Globally, derivatives in crypto started with Bitcoin futures contract back in 2017 end, launched by the world’s largest futures exchange CME. As of 2025, crypto derivatives market has already hit a new record of $8.94 trillion in monthly trading volumes, according to CoinLaw.

In India, Patel adds that saving TDS is the “least important” reason for the growing interest, instead overall trades being cheaper, flexibility to take long or short positions on a wider variety of tokens through perpetual futures are driving trades.

“In fact, on Mudrex, spot traders and futures traders don’t often overlap,” he said.

Vikram Subburaj, Co-founder and CEO of Giottus that launched its futures trade last month, said, “F&O is a natural progression to trading. The initial volumes for all exchanges majorly came from spot trading. Now with spot market maturing, we saw a rub off effect of derivatives market in the crypto space. In the last two years, interest in crypto futures have been slowly growing and it has got good momentum now.”

“Giottus has just started with the offering, so we are testing with 10X leverage for now. Overall, for most exchanges, if you see volumes, 70-80 percent of that is coming from crypto futures,” he told Moneycontrol.

In a CNBC-TV18 article from April, CoinDCX CEO Sumit Gupta too had said, “Derivatives offer strategic advantages, and many equity traders already understand the risk-reward equation. Crypto futures now account for over 80 percent of trading volume on Indian exchanges.”

This trend coincides with global policy changes in the US under President Donald Trump’s administration, in favour of cryptocurrencies.

Influencer-driven popularity

According to Kashif Raza, founder of crypto education platform Bitinning, beyond the grey area around tax benefits in F&O, the volumes and popularity of crypto futures is largely driven by the stock market influencers and big traders who command a huge community of followers, entering crypto.

“After SEBI had tightened regulations for F&O and for these influencers…all the stock market influencers who were champions in F&O had migrated to crypto. When they entered crypto space along with their followers, crypto exchanges started pampering them to get more users with foreign trips and other benefits,” Raza told Moneycontrol.

Raza added that the percentage of F&O trades are growing significantly. “India is already the largest market for F&O in stocks globally, and this will repeat in crypto…Now it will double down as speculative gaming and real money gaming guys too will enter following the crackdown of the gaming sector,” he said.

On the equities side, brokers such as Zerodha, Groww, Angel One, Upstox and Dhan make most of their money from derivate.