By Prashant Marathe | EduInvesting.in | 21 May 2025
🪞 At a Glance:
AI-themed cryptocurrencies like Fetch.ai, Bittensor, and Render are up 50% to 100% this week alone. Global investors are aping in. Meanwhile in India? Our regulators are still asking if “blockchain” is a type of Excel file. Spoiler alert: It’s not.
India, the land of jugaad and tech brains, is sitting out the biggest crypto theme since Dogecoin memes — all because we’re still scared crypto will fund kidnappings, raves, and Tinder dates.
Let’s break down this massive disconnect, and why Indian retail will once again arrive late to the party… only to find the biryani cold and chairs taken.
💸 What’s Happening Globally?
| AI Token | 7-Day Change | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| $FET (Fetch.ai) | +92% | Decentralized AI agents |
| $RNDR (Render) | +55% | Decentralized GPU rendering |
| $TAO (Bittensor) | +48% | Incentivized machine learning |
| $AGIX (SingularityNET) | +76% | AI marketplace |
- Total AI-token market cap crosses $10 billion
- Nvidia earnings and OpenAI hype driving the surge
- Crypto + AI = New gold rush
🌐 Global Sentiment: “Buy AI Coins Now or Cry Later”
- Reddit threads calling it the “next Ethereum”
- Binance and Coinbase adding new AI pairs daily
- Institutional interest from VCs, hedge funds, and ex-Twitter engineers who now identify as “AI monks”
🇮🇳 Meanwhile in India…
🤡 Our Regulator’s Greatest Hits:
- “Crypto has no intrinsic value.”
- “We need more time to study blockchain.”
- “It may be used for terror funding.”
- Translation: We don’t understand it, so we’ll ban it just in case.
🤦♂️ Ground Reality:
- No INR on-ramps (thanks to banking restrictions)
- 1% TDS on every trade — yes, even loss-making ones
- No loss-offset allowed in income tax
- Most Indian exchanges have either shut down or turned into ghost towns
🤖 What Makes AI Tokens Hot?
- Unlike shitcoins, these tokens actually do something.
- They reward data sharing, GPU usage, and algorithm training.
- Think of them as Uber for GPUs or Airbnb for algorithms.
🔮 Simple Analogy:
AI tokens = Stocks of future AI infrastructure… without needing SEBI’s blessing.
Problem is, if you’re Indian —
You can’t buy them easily.
You can’t withdraw profits easily.
And you’ll probably pay 35% tax on gains (plus get a side-eye from your CA).
📉 India’s Lost Opportunity
| Year | Missed Trend | Countries That Capitalized |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Bitcoin boom | USA, Korea, Japan |
| 2020 | DeFi Summer | Singapore, Switzerland |
| 2023 | NFT Mania | UAE, Hong Kong |
| 2025 | AI Tokens | USA, Dubai, Germany |
And where’s India?
Still forming a committee.
“We are working on a framework.” — Every Indian bureaucrat since 2016
🧠 EduInvesting Take:
This is classic “Indian auntie syndrome”.
- See something new? “Yeh toh fraud lagta hai.”
- See the neighbour making money? “Shaayad try karna chahiye.”
- Try it yourself? By then, it’s too late.
We’ll regulate after the world moves on to brain-chip tokens.
We’ll launch CBDC when nobody cares about digital rupees anymore.
💡 What Needs to Change?
- Educate, don’t ban: Blockchain isn’t scary. Your cousin’s portfolio is.
- Regulate INR on-ramps, not kill them: Crypto isn’t going away. Just make it less shady.
- Drop the TDS nonsense: 1% per trade is like charging rent every time you move furniture.
- Talk to actual builders, not just committee walas: The people building AI + crypto don’t wear suits. They wear hoodies.
🪦 Final Word:
India missed Bitcoin, missed NFTs, missed DeFi. Now we’re about to miss AI crypto too — unless Mukesh Ambani launches JioCoin and drags us back into relevance.
Until then, the only AI India is using… is in writing reports about AI.
Namaste.
Tags: AI tokens, Crypto India, TDS on Crypto, RBI vs Blockchain, FET token, Render, Bittensor, India crypto policy, EduInvesting satire, Web3 India
