Crypto Tax Reporting India: What You Need to Know About Filing Crypto Taxes in India

When you buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrency in India, you’re not just participating in a new financial system—you’re creating a taxable event, a transaction that triggers income or capital gains obligations under Indian law. Also known as crypto income tax, this is no longer optional. The Income Tax Department, India’s official tax authority that now actively monitors blockchain activity through exchange data and bank reporting requires every crypto user to report gains, even from airdrops or swaps. If you got tokens for free, sold Bitcoin for rupees, or swapped one coin for another, you owe taxes.

There’s no gray area here. The 2022 budget changed everything: a flat 30% tax on all crypto gains, no deductions for losses, and a 1% TDS on every transaction above ₹50,000. That means even if you broke even on your portfolio, you still paid tax on every trade. And if you received tokens from an airdrop—like GDOGE, SPIN, or KALA—you must declare their fair market value as income on the day you got them. The blockchain analytics, tools used by tax authorities to trace wallet activity across public ledgers make it easy to spot unreported activity. Banks now flag crypto-related transfers, and exchanges like CoinFalcon, Mercatox, or BUX are required to share user data with the government. Ignoring this isn’t negligence—it’s a legal risk.

You don’t need to be a crypto expert to file correctly. You just need to track your buys, sells, and swaps. Use a simple spreadsheet or free tool to log dates, amounts, and rupee values. If you mined, staked, or earned interest, those are also taxable. The key is consistency: if you reported a $100 airdrop as income last year, you can’t pretend it was a gift this year. India’s system is strict, but it’s predictable. What trips people up isn’t the tax rate—it’s forgetting to report small transactions or assuming that because a project failed (like HAI or GDOGE), the tax obligation vanished. It didn’t. Your liability is tied to when you received value, not when it later crashed.

Below, you’ll find real breakdowns of crypto events that triggered tax liability in India—from failed airdrops to DeFi swaps—and how users handled them. No fluff. No theory. Just what actually matters when the tax season hits.