Best way to buy and hodl crypto in self-custody in India?

mr.stark said:

Hi, I'd like to try my hand in crypto, but the ecosystem and policies in India seems quite poor. Hostile even. My plan is to buy crypto, move it to a self-custody wallet and hodl long term. I've read that crypto exchanges in India don't allow withdrawals or have limits on how much or what you can withdraw. I'd appreciate advice on how I can do this!

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Which crypto are you interested in? I would suggest monero.

I've read that crypto exchanges in India don't allow withdrawals or have limits on how much or what you can withdraw.

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If you use these exchanges, that means you don't own your crypto, and goes against everything crypto stands for in the first place.

They do allow withdrawals. Not any limits as far as I know. As far as self custody, I would highly recommend a hardware wallet like Nano ledger. If you want to first try out a software wallet to practice, then Exodus is a good one. But hardware is always better especially if you have a lot of value to secure.

Just fyi, you can't buy crypto legally in India without doing a full kyc at a registered crypto exchange within India.

mr.stark said:

First I'd like to build some positions in BTC and ETH, and then get into other coins. XMR is also definitely something I'm looking to get. Interesting project


Exactly my plan as well, but I was thinking to try Metamask. Will look into Exodus, thanks for the suggestion.


Are you sure? I don't want to get my crypto stuck in the exchange's custody. To give some examples, WazirX seems to have a withdrawal limit now after the hack (not sure about how it was before) and I found a list of withdrawable tokens for CoinDCX that doesn't even include BTC.

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Metamask is quite popular as well and a good option for a software wallet. and Eventually hardware wallet in the future.

I would stay away for wazirx as of now because of the hack. There are many other exchanges in India that you can try such as bitbns, coindcx etx. I'm quite sure you'll have to do full KYC to get max withdrawal privileges; but that will not take time or effort.

Now the question is how to get the crypto that you cant withdraw (like BTC in your case). In that case, you will have to exchange/swap the crypto that you can withdraw (like ETH or Tether) to the one you want. For that you can do the swap from wallets such as exodus or go to a different decentralized KYC-less DeFi exchange such as uniswap (and many others) and once you get the BTC, withdraw to your personal wallet. But you'll have to do the analysis of which swap combination to use based on lowest mining fees (for trasfer) and swap fees.

Hardware wallet, always have been, Monero etc isn't going to give much return on investment unless you're a activist you can put your money in it.

it's has been delisted from all major platforms so investment wise not an ideal choice, privacy wise best!

Buy some ETH, Solana from Full KYC decentralized exchange and download kraken app wallet/Metamask move your funds their.

There are on/off-ramp options and p2p as well and many popular wallets do allow you to purchase directly with a card, but that should be your next step once you have figured out steps above.