CoinDCX co-founder Sumit Gupta says India needs more crypto players for market maturity, denies conflict of interest with Coinbase post funding

Sumit Gupta, co-founder and CEO, CoinDCX

CoinDCX Co-founder Sumit Gupta said Coinbase’s planned India entry will bolster the domestic crypto ecosystem, dismissing concerns over conflict of interest following the US crypto giant’s latest investment round in the Indian exchange.

Coinbase had earlier said it will start its crypto trading services in the country by the end of this year.

CoinDCX fundraise from Coinbase Ventures at a $2.45 billion valuation broke the three-year funding lull in India’s crypto sector. The fresh capital raised will be used to expand business and develop new offerings in India and the Middle East regions.

“We are not sharing the investment size as of now, but this is an extension to our last round. Coinbase Ventures has been our investor for over five years now. This new round was a sizeable investment, which will be sufficient for us for many years,” he told Moneycontrol in an interview.

CoinDCX's last significant funding round was a $135 million Series D in April 2022, led by Pantera Capital and Steadview Capital Management. The round valued the company at $2.15 billion.

Gupta added that CoinDCX is already financially strong and is profitable. He now wants to focus on growing the platform’s user base from over 20 million to 50 million, and eyeing the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to contribute nearly 30 percent of its revenue by 2026.

What’s in it for Coinbase?

In March 2025, Coinbase had announced that it has registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as part of its international expansion strategy, and will be starting with crypto trading services in country later this year.

According to Gupta, there won’t be any conflict of interest if Coinbase launches its own exchange. He believes getting more bigger players into India will expand the market and help drive momentum in policy negotiations with the Indian government.

“Over time even if other companies become big, eventually there's going to be an Indian domestic crypto company which will be the market leader given that the nature of this sector is such that local nuances will play a big role, similar to financial services,” he said.

Gupta added, “We want more and more companies to come together, fight this battle and then make sure that more Indians adopt crypto in a responsible manner. If you look at it from that perspective, it doesn't matter if some portion of market share goes to someone else.”

Through this investment, Coinbase will get one-shot exposure to two markets: India and the Middle East, aligning with its international exposure strategy, Gupta said. Coinbase has limited presence on the retail side of trading in UAE and is more focused on institutional customers there, Gupta explained.

CoinDCX’s UAE expansion

CoinDCX had acquired BitOasis in 2024, which has remained the leading virtual assets trading platform in the MENA, commanding the highest trading volumes in Emirati Dirhams.

In May 2025, it had launched its crypto trading services through BitOasis in Bahrain. “The results have been impressive—BitOasis has seen a 4x revenue growth, now contributing 20 percent to our total revenue,” Gupta had said previously.

The big India bet

Not just Coinbase, by now Binance, KuCoin, Bybit among several other global exchanges are aggressively looking at expanding into India while negotiating terms with the regulators.

While India’s crypto market as compared to the US, China and other developed geographies, may appear smaller, Gupta emphasised that these global exchanges are setting shops for the long haul.

“It depends on the perspective. If you're looking at it here and now, then it’s a very different market but if you're looking at three or five years down the line, it's going to be very different,” Gupta said.

He added, “Companies like Bybit, Coinbase, Binance are not stupid. They are seeing something, which they have already seen in various other countries as well and they are following that trend (pattern of growth) in India. India is going to be a large market for crypto assets and will be the victory sector overall in the years to come and these people are essentially building for that.”

Recovery from hack

The year 2025 had also thrown a few curveballs at CoinDCX. In July 2025, CoinDCX faced a cyberattack in one of its internal operational accounts used for liquidity provisioning, draining about $44.2 million.

To be sure, no customer funds were impacted and their main assets remained safe in a secure cold wallet infrastructure. CoinDCX had announced a bug bounty program and tried utilising its own funds to recover the lost amount.

“We paid it from our pocket and even after that we have a healthy balance sheet that continues to fund the business. This investment on top of that is additional war chest that we have gotten to continue to double down on. We continue to operate with high good revenues and healthy EBITDA margins,” Gupta said.

Coinbase’s second innings

Coinbase has had a troubled journey in India after launching in the country in April 2022, the same year the government implemented high taxes on crypto. There were further challenges on enabling UPI-based payments to buy or sell crypto on the platform.

In May 2022, Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, said during the company’s first quarter earnings call that the company faced “soft pressure” from the Reserve Bank of India to disable UPI-based payments.

In September 2023, the company informed customers in India, stating that it was discontinuing services to Indian customers and their funds had to be withdrawn from their accounts by September 25. This deadline was extended to October 31.