If you hold crypto in India, this has been a rough week for getting your money out. Coinbase has not been able to pay out rupees for five days. Unocoin, the country's oldest exchange, has shut down everything, logins included, after someone got into its servers. And ZebPay says rupee withdrawals are still working, only slower than usual. Three exchanges, three different problems, all in the same week, and none of them has given users a firm date for when things go back to normal.

Coinbase: five days and no timeline

Coinbase's trouble started on November 9, when its status page flagged an incident titled "Bank Payments Unavailable - INR (India)" at 3:07 a.m. Pacific, 4:37 p.m. in India. A second update later that day narrowed it down: rupee withdrawals were the problem, while deposits, UPI payments and bank account linking were still working. Five days later, on November 14, Coinbase India said on X that withdrawals were still unavailable because of an outage at its banking partner, and that the outage is hitting the bank's payouts for all of its clients, not just Coinbase. The bank has not been named, and no timeline has been given. The exchange says user funds are safe and it is working with the bank to restore payouts, and it has warned users not to start new withdrawals, since requests made during the outage could fail or stay pending.

Coinbase only relaunched direct rupee deposits and withdrawals in India on June 1 this year, through the Immediate Payment Service, after registering with India's Financial Intelligence Unit. The relaunch is led by head of product Roshan Prabhakar. One quirk of the Indian setup is worth knowing: once you link a bank account, Coinbase's policy in India permanently disables crypto transfers from that account. Separately, the exchange has scheduled maintenance for late Saturday night in India, which it says is unrelated to the withdrawal outage.

Unocoin: a breach, then total shutdown

Unocoin's problem is worse, and it is a different kind of problem. The exchange detected unauthorized access to its servers on November 6, and on November 9 it suspended everything: logins, trading, deposits and withdrawals. Its website has been offline, showing gateway errors, while the team rebuilds its servers from the ground up, a job it says will take four to five working days. On November 12 the exchange disclosed outgoing transfers from an Ethereum address tied to its wallets at custodian BitGo. BitGo froze Unocoin's enterprise account on November 6 at the exchange's request, and Unocoin says the transfers were signed and broadcast outside BitGo's platform. The working suspicion is that someone misused the backup signing feature on BitGo's multisignature wallets, which lets a wallet holder move funds if BitGo itself becomes unavailable.

Unocoin has not said how much was moved, where it went, or whether any customer funds were lost. It says more than 90 percent of customer crypto sits in cold storage and that no user funds have been lost, but it also admits it cannot currently log into the frozen BitGo accounts, so the full picture is not yet known. No large-scale theft has been independently verified.

ZebPay and the bigger picture

ZebPay, the third exchange in the pile-up, said on November 11 that rupee withdrawals are still working but taking longer than usual, blaming a technical issue at its banking partner. So the pattern is not one exchange with one bug. Two of the three problems trace back to banking partners, and the third is a security breach. India's cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, warned on November 5 about an AI-assisted campaign targeting crypto exchanges and other financial firms, though no connection to the Unocoin incident has been established. The week also included Enforcement Directorate raids on CoinDCX and Delta Exchange, which Global Crypto Press covered on November 7. Taken together, it adds up to a bad stretch for Indian crypto users. If you need rupees out of an Indian exchange this weekend, check the status page before you try, and do not start a withdrawal you cannot afford to have stuck in limbo.

None of this is a story about crypto itself breaking. The coins are fine, the blockchains are fine, and two of the three exchanges say the money is safe. It is a story about the plumbing between crypto and the banking system, and about what happens when that plumbing fails or someone breaks into the building. India is one of the largest crypto markets in the world, and this week its users found out how much of their access depends on a handful of banks and custodians working properly. Until the withdrawals flow again, the safest thing a user in India can do is wait, watch the status pages, and keep their crypto where they can reach it.

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Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
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