Overseas platforms turn stablecoins into Indian grocery and fuel vouchers

Indians are buying groceries, fuel, gold and airline tickets with value that started as cryptocurrency. The path, described by The Economic Times on 8 September, runs through overseas fintech companies in Sweden, Germany and Singapore. A user sends a stablecoin such as USDT from a private wallet to one of those firms. The firm buys closed-loop gift cards in bulk from Indian voucher aggregators and delivers the card to the user.

Closed-loop prepaid instruments, usable only at named stores and not for cash-out or third-party transfers, sit outside the Reserve Bank of India's monetary limits for open wallets. That is why the cards can be issued without an RBI cap. It is also why tax and anti-money-laundering officers are looking at the corridor. The rupee never moves through an authorised dealer as a crypto conversion. The stablecoin leaves a wallet. A store voucher arrives.

One platform has issued more than 16 million cards to Indian users. ET recorded a conversion offer of about Rs 88 per USDT against an onshore indication above Rs 95. The spread is the platform's margin. A person in the crypto trade told the paper that buyers of jewellery and tickets who have not declared the coins will accept a worse rate. The coins, on that account, do not appear in income-tax returns.

India already taxes virtual digital assets and requires some foreign-asset reporting. Gifting crypto between relatives can be exempt under Section 56. This corridor is not a gift. It is a purchase of a voucher with an offshore asset. Enforcement Directorate raids earlier in 2026 on alleged on-ramp and off-ramp services, including a Bengaluru case put above Rs 2,500 crore, show that the agencies already treat some of these pipes as foreign-exchange problems.

The new reporting does not name a ban. It names a mechanism that works today and a regulatory gap around cross-border payments, tax and AML. The checkable numbers are the 16 million cards, the Rs 88 print, and the fact that the Indian partners issue store-locked vouchers rather than cash. What happens next depends on whether the tax department, the Financial Intelligence Unit or the RBI asks those partners for the wallet addresses behind the bulk orders.