[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Coinbase has started a direct rupee deposit and withdrawal service in India.

Cointelegraph, a blockchain outlet, reported on Sunday local time that users in India can now deposit and withdraw rupees between local bank accounts and Coinbase through the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS).

Users can access spot trading, perpetual futures and advanced trade, along with rupee deposits and withdrawals, on a single platform. Coinbase also built a rupee order book in India to pool local liquidity and connected it to global exchanges.

The service launch aligns with Coinbase’s strategy to expand again in India. When it entered the Indian market in 2022, Coinbase briefly supported rupee deposits using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) but halted the feature within days of launch. At the time, partners also stopped support after payment authorities distanced themselves from the use of UPI for cryptocurrencies.

Coinbase later registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in March 2025. The company said the registration gave it an official basis to provide cryptocurrency trading services under India’s anti-money laundering (AML) framework. The rupee service launch can be seen as a follow-up after such regulatory arrangements.

The market Coinbase has entered is already highly competitive. Local exchanges such as CoinDCX, CoinSwitch, ZebPay and WazirX are securing users in India. Global exchanges such as Binance and KuCoin are also widely used, but they have often provided rupee access through crypto-only routes or peer-to-peer methods rather than direct bank transfers. Coinbase appears to be seeking to differentiate itself by offering direct transfers based on IMPS.

India is also a market with a heavy regulatory burden. A 30 percent tax applies to a large share of digital asset gains, and some transactions are subject to a 1 percent withholding tax. Even so, global exchanges have not abandoned India because of its large user base. Chainalysis ranked India first among more than 150 countries in its 2025 global crypto adoption index, based on retail on-chain activity, use of centralised exchanges and decentralised finance (DeFi), and transaction volumes.

Against this backdrop, Coinbase has resumed its push into India by operating within the local regulatory framework and directly linking bank accounts to trading. It pulled back in 2022 due to payment infrastructure issues, but it has now set out a route to re-enter, highlighting its FIU registration and IMPS integration. A key question will be whether support for direct bank transfers leads to actual user inflows amid local exchanges and global rivals.