The Five Questions to Ask Any Indian Crypto Platform Before Your First Deposit

They cover where your money sits apart from the company's own money, what the fee page leaves out, and what leaving costs. Then two more: whether the platform is a registered reporting entity, and who answers when something breaks.

Run all five on whichever platform you are evaluating, including this one, before the first rupee moves.

"Which app is best" is the wrong question

Most comparisons rank platforms on app store stars, a screenshot of the lowest fee, or a vague claim about being trusted by lakhs of users. None of that is checkable by you, in the moment you need it, before you deposit.

Ask instead what the platform will put in writing, on five specific points. The same five checks work on every platform in the Indian market, including the one open on your phone right now, and including Qatobit.

1. Where does your money sit?

Does the platform state in writing that customer money is held apart from the money it uses to run the business? Can you verify that separation yourself, or are you taking it on faith?

A platform that publishes a live or dated Proof of Reserves is answering a stronger claim than a support macro saying yes, we are safe.

Read what the document is before you trust it. An attestation confirms the numbers matched on one specific day, an audit examines the full financials over a period. Most platforms that publish anything publish the attestation.

Fund segregation means customer money is kept apart from the money the company runs on. A platform that can describe how that separation works, in its own published words, has cleared the first check.

Portfolio implication: if a platform cannot produce a dated, checkable answer here, size whatever you hold with it small and easy to withdraw until it can.

2. What does the fee page say, once you read all of it?

The headline transaction fee is rarely the whole cost.

Read the fee page the way a five-point checklist would. Start with the transaction fee itself, then the spread between the quoted price and the price you end up paying.

Then look at GST. It is usually added on top of that fee, at 18 percent of the fee, calculated on the fee amount.

Last, check whether the number shown before you confirm a transaction matches what lands in your account after.

Portfolio implication: if the full cost only becomes clear after money has already moved, your sizing decisions were guesses. You cannot budget a cost you cannot find.

3. What does leaving actually cost?

Ask this before you deposit: what happens on withdrawal, is there a minimum, a delay, or a lock-in period, and is there any fee for exiting a position. Most platforms charge nothing to leave and say so plainly. A platform that is vague here, or buries the answer in a support ticket, is telling you something by omission.

The extreme version of this question is what happens to your holdings if the platform stops operating altogether. If a platform cannot answer the ordinary withdrawal question clearly, it will not have a good answer to the extreme one either.

Portfolio implication: an allocation you cannot cheaply unwind carries a hidden cost, whatever the marketing says about instant execution.

4. Is it a registered reporting entity, and what does that cover?

Every crypto platform operating in India is expected to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit, FIU-IND, as a reporting entity.

FIU-IND's own site lists this under virtual digital asset service provider registration, on its FINnet 2.0 portal. You can check whether a platform appears there.

That registration means the platform verifies customer identity, keeps transaction records, and files reports on suspicious or high-value transactions under anti-money-laundering law.

That is a real floor, and a narrow one.

Registration under anti-money-laundering law covers identity checks and suspicious-transaction reporting. SEBI oversight of the product, an AMFI-style investor protection fund, and a guaranteed recourse body all sit outside it. That gap is why reading what legal actually covers matters.

The Reserve Bank of India has flagged this gap for years. Its repeated public caution on virtual currencies names customer protection and legal risk as open questions for anyone dealing in them. That caution was most recently reiterated in December 2017.

Portfolio implication: know which floor you are standing on. Registration tells you the platform answers to a regulator on money laundering grounds. Your money does not get the protection a SEBI-regulated product carries.

5. Who answers when something goes wrong, and how fast?

This is the check almost nobody runs before depositing, and the one that matters most once something breaks. Does the platform name an accountable contact for a complaint, with a stated response window, or does support mean a ticket number and silence?

You can test this in ten minutes without depositing a rupee: email the platform a real question and time the reply. A platform that answers specifically and quickly before it has your money is more likely to do the same after.

Portfolio implication: a platform that cannot tell you who is accountable on a good day will not suddenly produce an answer on a bad one. Test this well before you need it.

Running the five checks, three ways

The first-time depositor is moving money out of a savings account for the first time. Weight checks one and four hardest: where the money sits, and whether the platform is registered at all. Everything else can wait, as long as the first deposit stays small until the answers are in hand.

**The SIP habit, moved over from mutual funds**, already trusts a recurring, automated cadence. Here, checks two and three matter most. A SIP that quietly loses a little to spread and GST every cycle undoes the discipline the habit was supposed to protect. So does one that turns out to be expensive to unwind.

The investor who has already been burned once, here or on another platform, should run all five checks again wherever they land next. Put extra weight on check five. A prior bad experience sharpens two questions: whether the crypto sitting in an account is actually the holder's, and who is reachable when it turns out otherwise.

Run this on whatever platform you pick, ours included

Run them on the app already installed on your phone right now. Do it again the next time a platform changes its terms.

And run them on us: where your money sits, what our fee page says in full, what leaving costs, our FIU-IND status, and who answers when something goes wrong.

A platform that asks you to check should be able to survive being checked.

Frequently asked questions

What is the fastest way to check where a crypto platform's money sits?

Look for a live or dated Proof of Reserves page, or ask support whether customer money is held separately from the company's own. Only a specific, checkable statement counts as an answer here; general reassurance means the platform has not answered.

Does FIU-IND registration mean my money is protected like it would be with a mutual fund?

No. FIU-IND registration means the platform reports under anti-money-laundering rules: identity checks, transaction records, and filings on suspicious activity. SEBI-style investor protection and a guaranteed recourse fund sit outside that requirement, so treat "registered" and "regulated like a mutual fund" as two separate questions with two separate answers.

How long should reading a fee page take?

Under ten minutes, using the checklist in question two above. If the GST treatment, the spread, or the withdrawal fee cannot be found on the platform's own site inside that time, the fee page has failed the transparency test. A low headline transaction fee does not change that.

Should these five checks be run again on a platform I already use?

Yes. The checks work the same way after a first deposit as before one. Running them again whenever a platform changes its terms, or once a year regardless, keeps the habit doing its job.

Do these five checks apply to Qatobit too?

Yes, deliberately. Every platform, including this one, should be able to answer all five: where a customer's money sits, what its fee page says in full, and what leaving costs. The last two are its FIU-IND status and who is accountable when something goes wrong.

Crypto investments are subject to market risk. Not financial advice.