Crypto exchange Bitget eyes broader investment platform in India post FIU clearance in 2026, says CMO

Bitget, currently the world’s sixth largest crypto exchange by trading volumes, wants to go beyond crypto exchange services in India to offer a comprehensive investment platform in the near future, Chief Marketing Officer Ignacio Aguirre Franco told Moneycontrol.

The exchange in the process of getting its Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) registration in India, expecting it to get finalised in 2026, Franco said.

Amid growing competition from global crypto platforms in India such as Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin, Bybit among others, Bitget wants to go beyond just offering trading services through an investment platform that would have use cases combining centralised finance (CeFi), decentralised finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi).

“We are a global exchange, but India is obviously an important market for us. We are working with FIU here, hoping to get the license by 2026…The country is very tech savvy making it perfect for crypto adoption,” Franco said on the sidelines of India Blockchain Week in Bengaluru earlier this week.

Globally, Bitget has 1.8X proof of reserves and transactions of over $700 million.

Franco emphasised on the scope of cross border use cases and crypto debit cards as India has the largest inflow of remittances, but he added that this will have to start with educating the users in the country.

“We are looking to provide a financial gateway to the people. We don’t want them to be looking at us as a place they go and buy Bitcoin. When you mix CeFi, DeFi and TradFi, you create this platform for them. When people look to do an investment, we want to be the first platform to come to their mind. People should not look at us as separate exchange but as an investment platform,” he said.

He added, “Technology is evolving, and blockchain is replacing a lot of legacy financial systems. We will built for the future, and tokenised assets such as tokenised stocks will definitely become a thing.”

Previously, Bybit too had said that beyond running an exchange, eventually one of its ambitious plans will be to introduce a “crypto card” in India once they get regulatory clarity in the market.

Franco believes for many of these plans to materialise, India will “need to catch up on regulations” but with experiments such as central bank’s pilots of digital rupee or CBDC will encourage wider digital asset adoption in the country.

Ultimately, educating Indian users regarding the asset class will be critical, Franco said.

“People don’t like what they don’t understand. That’s what happens with new technology and products. The fact that we can make it accessible and simple to use, then you have AI to help with it. Bitget has an AI agent, GetAgent, that can be a personalised tool. If you are a beginner, you can use it understand the platform, if you are an advanced trader, you can validate your hypothesis,” he said.

In December 2023, around nine offshore exchanges including KuCoin, Binance, OKX, Houbi among others were found to be not registered under FIU-IND and weren’t aligned with the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.

Following this, the Indian government had ordered to block the URLs of these exchanges in India in January 2024. Even their apps were delisted from the Apple and Google’s app stores.

Many of them later worked with the Indian government to align with local regulations and are back in the market.

A major reason for the growing interest of the global exchanges including Binance, KuCoin, Coinbase and others in India, is its potential for population-scale crypto adoption.

According to Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index 2025, India recorded the highest crypto adoption globally for the third consecutive year. United States was second to India in this regards.