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Bitcoin and Ethereum drive crypto as a resilient asset and digital infrastructure; stablecoin volumes now top Visa and Mastercard. India faces key regulation.
Cryptocurrencies
Authored by Sumit Gupta, Co-Founder of CoinDCX: Crypto is one of the most misunderstood innovations of our time not because it is inherently complex, but because we continue to use a single word to describe two radically different phenomena. On the one hand, crypto refers to a new asset class, most visibly represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum. On the other hand, it describes a new digital format for recording, transferring, and programming value. The failure to distinguish between these two aspects has led to regulatory confusion, policy delays, and missed opportunities especially in emerging economies like India.
Crypto as an Asset: Not Just Speculation
Dismissed too often as speculative, crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum have quietly evolved into one of the most resilient asset classes of the last decade. Bitcoin, born in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, has proven that a digitally scarce asset can exist without a central issuer. From 2011 to 2021, Bitcoin delivered a compound annual growth rate of over 200%, outperforming every traditional asset class by a wide margin. Even as the market has cooled, Bitcoin’s long-term CAGR remains above 80%[1], making it a viable store of value in an era of macroeconomic uncertainty and currency debasement. This performance has not gone unnoticed , hedge funds, and even sovereign institutions are beginning to treat Bitcoin as a hedge against traditional market risks. London-listed companies now hold Bitcoin in treasury, and institutions in the US and EU are launching spot Bitcoin ETFs. The asset has graduated from niche curiosity to macro allocation.
Crypto as Infrastructure: The New Financial Internet
But price alone misses the bigger picture. Crypto is not just an asset—it’s an internet-native infrastructure for transferring and programming value. But crypto’s true potential lies beyond price charts. What’s emerging is a new format for transfer of value, much like the PDF transformed how we share documents or how MP3s revolutionized music. At the heart of this transformation are tokens or digital representations of real-world assets that live on programmable, permissionless infrastructure. The most immediate example is stablecoins. These instruments not speculative assets; they’re tokenized dollars, redeemable 1:1, but with the unique ability to move globally, instantly, and cheaply. Today, stablecoins facilitate more than $240 billion in monthly on-chain transactions. They’re being used for cross-border payments, savings, and trade. Stablecoin transaction volumes reached $5.7 trillion in 2024, with 2025 on track to be significantly higher, having already processed approximately $4.6 trillion across one billion transactions in just the first half of the year. More remarkably, these volumes now exceed the combined annual processing volumes of Visa and Mastercard. This evolution didn’t happen overnight. From Bitcoin’s early days, the industry has moved to more complex infrastructure. Ethereum, launched in 2015, introduced smart contracts self-executing code that made it possible to build decentralized applications. The ERC-20 standard enabled thousands of tokens to be created and traded globally. Decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, NFTs, and more followed. We are now seeing a layered ecosystem of blockchains Ethereum, Solana, Polygon each optimized for speed, cost, or composability. Like the early days of the internet, there’s competition, experimentation, and fragmentation. But over time, we will see convergence to a few dominant public infrastructures that power the next generation of finance, commerce, and governance.
For India, It’s Not “Yes or No”: It’s “How”
The future of crypto in India should not be reduced to a binary debate. Instead, it should be seen as a design challenge: how do we create a responsible, risk-sensitive, and innovation-friendly regulatory environment? We already have the talent. We have the platforms. What we now need is clarity. Sandboxes for experimentation. Recognition of crypto as a core layer of our digital public infrastructure. And for India’s policymakers, this format could become the backbone for programmable rupee-based stablecoins that bring transparency to subsidy delivery, cut costs in remittances, and enable instant trade settlement with partner nations.
Crypto isn’t just a disruption – it’s an upgrade.The question is will we build the future with it, or spend the next decade playing catch-up with countries that already are? Because here’s the thing: if India doesn’t set the rules for the next financial internet, someone else will. And we’ll be left downloading the terms and conditions.
Authored by Sumit Gupta, Co-Founder of CoinDCX
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Varun Yadav is a Sub Editor at News18 Business Digital. He writes articles on markets, personal finance, technology, and more. He completed his post-graduation diploma in English Journalism from the Indian Inst…Read More
Varun Yadav is a Sub Editor at News18 Business Digital. He writes articles on markets, personal finance, technology, and more. He completed his post-graduation diploma in English Journalism from the Indian Inst… Read More
September 14, 2025, 12:14 IST
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