Bitbns exchange: a review
A review of Bitbns Exchange's trading platform, fees, the reported 2022 breach, and where it stands in 2026.If you're sizing up Indian crypto exchanges and wondering whether Bitbns's long track record makes it a safe choice, this review covers the product and its troubled history in one place. You'll learn how the exchange's 80-plus INR pairs and volume-based fee discounts work, what happened in the 2022 breach the exchange disclosed only a year later, and how India's FIU registration, 30% tax, and 1% TDS regime shape trading there today.
Bitbns is one of India’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. Their platform for buying, selling, and trading Crypto is available via Web, and through mobile apps in Android and iOS. The service is available in English, and there is provision for 24/7 user support via ticket, as well as email, Telegram, and Reddit.
In presenting this review of Bitbns, I will divide my analysis into 6 sections, each containing the following salient features of the service:
- Reliability
- Security and trading
- Special features
- KYC/AML
- Bitbns in 2026
- Summary.
Reliability
According to its LinkedIn, Bitbns was founded in Bangalore by Gaurav Dahake, Prashant Singh, and Srikanth Sethumadhavan. The young trio of engineers are graduates of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and were technology entrepreneurs before jumping on the Crypto bandwagon. In 2020, hot on the heels of India’s Supreme Court striking down the Reserve Bank of India’s banking ban on crypto businesses, Bitbns launched its BNS utility token on a self-hosted IEO and later on KuCoin’s IEO platform, Spotlight. Bitbns claims over 500k users in India, and enjoys traffic in the hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Security and trading
The original version of this review noted that no hacks had been reported on the exchange. That statement did not age well. A February 2022 security breach, in which attackers took roughly $7.5M, was surfaced in March 2023 by on-chain investigator ZachXBT and reported by Inc42 and others. Bitbns founder Gaurav Dahake confirmed the hack, called the situation “not abnormal”, and said the exchange had held off on disclosing it publicly on the advice of law enforcement while an investigation was ongoing. What drew the sharpest criticism was that timing: users say the disruption was described to them at the time as “system maintenance”, so they made custody decisions without knowing material facts. In the years that followed, users repeatedly reported withdrawal difficulties, and in January 2025 the Delhi High Court heard a petition from more than 25 Bitbns users, prompting the court to question SEBI and the RBI about who actually oversees crypto platforms in India.
Bitbns reports safety as one of the main advantages of the platform. Certainly, they are forthcoming in providing tips to their users to avoid phishing and scamming by unscrupulous individuals. They also have enabled 2FA via SMS and Google Authenticator, which is mandatory for withdrawals.
Bitbns fees
Bitbns trading fees are about average for the industry. Bitbns does not charge different fees to market makers and maker takers. Whether you use Limit Orders or Market Orders, fees start 0.25%. For 30-day trading volumes above 6000 $USDT , the fees can be reduced to 0.1725% if paid with Bitbns’s $BNS token, for which there should be a balance of at least $200 worth of $BNS during the month. There are actually 10 levels of volume-based discounts which can make the fees as low as 0.03% for trading whales with monthly volumes above 80M $USDT and a $BNS balance above $200,000. Those discounts only matter at institutional volume.
Bitbns charges dynamic withdrawal fees that vary per listed token, for example, Bitcoin withdrawals are at 0.0005 $BTC per withdrawal at the moment. Bitbns fees are below-average as withdrawal fees hover around 0.0008 $BTC .
Bitbns also offers margin trading, which has its own set of rules for margin interest fees and profit-sharing. More detailed information can be found in Bitbns’s help article on margin trading and finance fees.
Liquidity Trading pairs
Bitbns is an exchange that is oriented towards India. It is also a growing exchange, with considerable web traffic volume. Growth is an important factor for any exchange as there are strong consolidation pressures in technology — startups naturally grow from niche markets.
Check out the top traded pairs, stats and performance on Bitbns according to CoinMarketCap.
The main advantage of Bitbns is the Crypto-to-Fiat pairs with the Indian rupee (INR or ₹). There are 80+ such pairs where cryptocurrencies can be acquired directly with INR, including $BTC , $ETH , $XRP , $LTC , $ADA , $XLM , $EOS , $TRX , $BCH , $XMR , and much more!
Deposits can be done via INR bank transfer from India (NEFT/RTGS/IMPS), as well as P2P inside the Bitbns interface. Deposits in fiat are also available in P2P via Tether ($USDT ) from the United Arab Emirates in Emirati dirham (AED), a market being actively sought after by Bitbns.
Bitbns for Pro and Business users
Bitbns offers a clean and easy-to-follow interface. For each trading pair on offer, a trading view is available. There are no right or wrong ways to do trading views, each trader will have his preferences and I encourage you to check Bitbns and see if you “feel” for its trading view. The order book is right under the customizable trading chart, and at its side is the order widget. Bitbns supports Limit Orders, Stop-Limit Orders, and Bracket Orders (where you specify a target exit and a stop-loss on the same order).
Margin trading is also available, with limited leverage. Currently, Bitbns offers up to 4x leverage on a select number of cryptocurrencies for margin financing.
Bitbns also offers a well-documented API which supports market data collection, order execution, and account management. The API is available in Node.js, Python, Go, and PHP.
Special features
Arbitrage plugin
A plugin is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge that identifies arbitrage opportunities between Bitbns and Binance, Huobi, Gate.io, and KuCoin. The plugin acts as a browser extension that will give you an alert and you can execute a trade in Bitbns without switching tabs. Quite innovative.
Bitdroplet investment plans
Bitdroplet is a service powered by Bitbns where individuals can buy Bitcoin in a manner similar to a structured investment product (SIP) in a bank. Users can specify a savings goal, and amount, and a frequency of deposit and what Bitbns calls a systematic purchase plan (SPP) is put in place, which allows dollar-cost averaging in building one’s Bitcoin reserves. Fees are 0.25% per installment, which can be set daily, weekly, or monthly, missed without penalty, paused at any time, and withdrawn in full for the same 0.25% fee.
Fixed income plans
Bitbns launched fixed income plans (FIPs) to promote its $BNS token. Users stake $BNS or other tokens and earn an interest rate on Bitbns. Early plans advertised up to 19% APY paid on $USDT for staking $BNS , and 12% APY on $USDT for staking $USDT . Treat headline yields like these with caution: they are set by the exchange as a marketing expense, not backed by any external return, and they can be repriced or withdrawn at any time. The rate is also only as good as the platform’s ability to honor withdrawals.
KYC/AML
Bitbns offers an expedited KYC/AML process that happens completely in-app. Indian nationals must provide a national ID, and bank account details. International users provide their passports. The whole process is over in a couple minutes. The original review noted that small deposits and Crypto-to-Crypto trading were possible without verification; under India’s current anti-money-laundering framework, KYC is mandatory before trading.
Bitbns is not registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or any other U.S. regulatory entity, so U.S. residents should not assume they can lawfully use the platform.
Bitbns in 2026
The Indian regulatory picture has hardened into something workable but costly. As of a December 2023 government disclosure, Bitbns was among the domestic platforms registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND), the compliance baseline for exchanges operating in the country. Since 2022, Indian traders pay a flat 30% tax on crypto gains, with no offsetting of losses, plus a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on most transactions, a regime that pushed much of India’s trading volume offshore.
Bitbns itself is no longer plausibly called India’s largest exchange; competitors such as CoinDCX and CoinSwitch operate at a larger scale. The exchange continues to run, and in March 2024 it announced it was reintroducing express INR withdrawals, initially for a limited group of users; we have not independently confirmed their availability since. The reported 2022 breach and the user complaints that reached the Delhi High Court belong in any assessment of counterparty risk.
In Summary
Bitbns is a feature-rich “entry-level exchange” with a genuinely inventive product history: INR pairs at real depth, an arbitrage browser plugin, and Bitdroplet’s systematic purchase plans. Its record on transparency is another matter. A $7.5M breach the exchange disclosed only a year later, described to users at the time as “system maintenance”, weighs against the benefit of the doubt, and the withdrawal complaints that followed reinforce the oldest rule of centralized exchanges: they are trading venues, not vaults. If you use Bitbns, keep balances small, withdraw regularly, and move long-term holdings to a self-custody wallet such as MetaMask.