Is Binance legal in India? What its FIU-IND registration does and does not mean

For an individual user in India, neither FIU-IND’s 2024 penalty against Binance nor Binance’s later registration made using the platform an offence. In August 2024 Binance announced that it had registered with the Financial Intelligence Unit, India (FIU-IND) as a reporting entity. That was about two months after FIU-IND fined it for serving Indian clients without meeting its obligations under the country’s anti-money-laundering law. The penalty order names Binance companies; it does not name or penalise their users.

According to FIU-IND’s order summary, Binance was already a reporting entity because of the services it provided in India, and the June 2024 penalty was for not meeting the duties that come with that status under Chapter IV of the PMLA and the PML Rules. Registering with FIU-IND does not create those duties, and it is not a licence to run an exchange. It is not approval from the Reserve Bank of India, and it is not a government endorsement of crypto. Your tax obligations are a separate matter, and registration does not touch them.

This page goes through what the FIU-IND order and Binance’s own announcement actually say, and where people read more into them than is there. Our guide to Binance P2P with UPI touches on legality in its FAQ; this page is the longer answer. None of this is legal advice. If a large sum or a dispute is involved, speak to a lawyer in India.

Registered with FIU-IND is not the same as licensed

Two words get mixed up in almost every conversation about this: registered and licensed. They sound close. They describe different things.

According to FIU-IND’s published summary of its June 2024 order, Binance, by operating as a virtual digital asset service provider, carries on a designated business under Section 2(sa)(vi) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA), and is therefore a reporting entity under Section 2(1)(wa) of the Act.

The order summary treats Binance as a reporting entity because it operated as a virtual digital asset service provider, not because it had registered; the notice was issued because it was not meeting the duties that status carries. Registering with FIU-IND is the formal step that goes with that status. Nothing in the order summary or in Binance’s announcement describes it as FIU-IND checking whether the platform is financially sound, supervising its markets, or approving its products. The headline of Binance’s own announcement says it registered as a reporting entity. It does not say licensed.

Why does the difference matter to an ordinary user? Because most of the confusion online runs in one of two directions. One says Binance was banned in India and never came back. The other says Binance is now officially approved. The documents support neither.

Three dates that explain where things stand: December 2023, June 2024, August 2024

The current position did not arrive in one step. It came out of an enforcement case, and the order of events explains why the registration exists at all.

On 28 December 2023, FIU-IND issued a notice to Binance under Section 13 of the PMLA. According to the published summary, the reason was that Binance was providing services to Indian clients without adhering to its statutory obligations under the Act. The notice asked Binance to show why action should not be taken against it.

Binance then made written and oral submissions. On 19 June 2024 the Director of FIU-IND found the charges substantiated and imposed a total penalty of Rs 18,82,00,000, which is eighteen crore eighty-two lakh rupees. The summary lists three contraventions, each of Section 12(1) of the PMLA read with provisions of the PML Rules: Rule 7(1); Rules 3(1)(D) and 7(3); and Rule 8(2). Alongside the penalty, FIU-IND issued specific directions to ensure compliance with Chapter IV of the PMLA and the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005.

The order also says who it covers: Binance Investments Co., Ltd. (Seychelles), Binance Holdings Limited (Cayman Islands), Binance (Switzerland) AG, or any other entity carrying out activities in India through various URLs, including https://www.binance.com. So the order is not limited to one company in the group.

On 15 August 2024, Binance’s official account on Binance Square announced that Binance had registered as a reporting entity with FIU-IND. Binance called this its “19th global regulatory achievement” and said its website and application were “now fully accessible to Indian users.” That is the company describing its own service. It is not a government notice, and it should be read that way. The phrase “now fully accessible” is Binance’s own; it implies access from India had been restricted before.

The document FIU-IND published is a one-page summary. It says the summary is only representational, holds no legal significance, and cannot be relied on or cited as precedent in any other case. Everything this section says about the order comes from that summary; the full reasoning behind each finding is not in it, and this page does not guess at it.

What being a reporting entity means for Binance, and for your account

The June 2024 order points to two sets of obligations: Chapter IV of the PMLA, and the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005. The summary groups them under AML/CFT, short for anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism. Described at that level, the duties fall into three broad kinds:

• verifying who the customer is before and while providing the service;
• keeping records of customers and their transactions;
• reporting to FIU-IND what the law and rules require to be reported.

The summary does not set out each rule in detail, so this page does not try to either. The rule numbers cited in the penalty are listed in the section above. What each one requires is in the rules themselves.

For you, the practical effect is mostly in the identity step. A platform carrying these duties has a legal reason to verify who you are, to hold on to that information, and to come back with questions. If Binance asks for another document, a clearer photo, or more detail about a transaction, that request fits the duties Chapter IV of the PMLA places on reporting entities. It is not, by itself, a sign that you did something wrong.

It also means the details you hand over are part of a record. Letting another person trade through your account, or opening one with someone else’s documents, cuts straight across the duties described above. The same is true on the payment side: a P2P trade paid from a UPI handle in a different name tends to cause problems long before anyone thinks about legal status.

Four things registration does not give you

Most misreadings stretch the registration to cover things it was never about. Four come up often.

It is not a licence or an RBI approval. Neither the order summary nor Binance’s announcement describes FIU-IND as authorising Binance to run an exchange, and the Reserve Bank of India is not mentioned in either. A post that calls Binance “RBI-approved” or “legalised by the government” is reading something into the registration that the sources do not say.

It is not protection for your balance. Being a reporting entity is about anti-money-laundering duties. None of the sources behind this page say anything about compensation or deposit insurance for crypto held on Binance, and none describe registration as a safeguard for customer funds. How much you keep on any platform is still your own risk decision.

It is not a promise about your bank or payment app. Whether a transfer from your bank account or UPI app goes through is decided by that bank or payment provider, under its own limits and checks. A platform’s registration with FIU-IND does not change those. Our guide to mobile money limits and KYC tiers explains why the payment side and the exchange side are separate systems. It is written mainly for mobile-money markets, but the split applies here too.

It is not tax clearance. Being registered says nothing about what you owe or what gets reported for tax. That sits with a different department, covered next.

Each of the other countries we cover lands somewhere different: Pakistan and Kenya have dedicated laws, Sri Lanka has none yet, and in Bangladesh the central bank’s circular says these transactions are not permitted.

Is tax part of this? Only at one point

Tax runs under different law and a different department. FIU-IND registration concerns money-laundering controls. Income tax belongs to the Income Tax Department.

The point where the two sit close together is TDS. Some transfers of virtual digital assets are subject to TDS, and that TDS has to be reported. Under the old Income Tax Act, the department’s TDS Compliance FAQ describes Form 26QE as the TDS-cum-challan statement for TDS on the transfer of virtual digital assets, under Section 194S.

That changed on 1 April 2026. The Income Tax Act, 2025 applies to events on or after that date, and the section numbering is different. According to the same FAQ, where the credit or payment happened on or before 31 March 2026, the old-Act forms still apply. For events on or after 1 April 2026, the statement is filed under the new Act, and under the Income Tax Rules, 2026 a common Form No. 141 can be used.

This page gives no rates, thresholds or filing steps. Those depend on your own situation, and the rules are partway through a changeover. Articles written before April 2026 describe the old forms, which now apply only to earlier transactions, so check which law a piece was written under before relying on it. For anything that applies to you, start from the Income Tax Department’s FAQ listed at the end of this page and take the specifics to a tax professional.

How do you check the position on the day you read this?

Everything above was checked in September 2026. Regulatory positions change, so it is more useful to know where to look than to trust this page, or any page, indefinitely.

For anything from the regulator, go to FIU-IND’s own website, fiuindia.gov.in. A summary of the June 2024 order discussed here is published there. For Binance’s side, look at announcements from its verified official channels, and read them as the company’s account of its own position. For TDS forms and deadlines, the Income Tax Department’s portal is the source.

Two habits save a lot of confusion. Check the date on whatever you are reading: pieces from before 15 August 2024, when Binance announced its website and app were now fully accessible to Indian users, describe a different situation. And be wary of screenshots of “circulars” passed around in chat groups. If a government body has said something, it will be on that body’s website.

If what you actually need is the practical side of buying USDT with rupees, that is covered step by step in our UPI guide. That page explains how P2P works. It does not change anything written here about status.

Sources for this page, checked September 2026: FIU-IND Order in original No. 10/DIR/FIU-IND/2024 in the matter of Binance u/s Section 13, dated 19.06.2024; Binance Registered as a Reporting Entity with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit, posted by Binance on Binance Square on 15 August 2024; and the Income Tax Department’s TDS Compliance FAQ.