Key Highlights
- Onramp is marketing crypto-paid gift cards to Indian users ahead of IPL.
- Under India’s VDA rules, using crypto for a purchase can still amount to a taxable transfer.
- Users may need to track acquisition cost and INR value even for something as small as a streaming subscription.
Onramp Money is pushing a familiar crypto promise ahead of the Indian Premier League (IPL) season: skip the payment friction and buy your JioHotstar access with digital assets instead.
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In a promotional post aimed at Indian users, the platform pitched Hotstar gift cards as a quick crypto-funded way to stay ready for the popular cricket tournament. The company’s website says users can buy gift cards with crypto, supports UPI in India, and offers gift-card access across more than 90 countries.
The timing is obvious. IPL 2026 is scheduled to begin on March 28, while JioHotstar is carrying the tournament on its platform, turning subscription top-ups into an easy seasonal sell for crypto-payment firms.
What Indian users need to know
Buying a gift card with crypto is not the same as paying in INR. The catch for Indian users is that the transaction may look like a simple consumer purchase, but the crypto leg can still trigger tax accounting. India’s VDA framework taxes income from the transfer of a virtual digital asset at 30%, allows only the cost of acquisition as a deduction, and bars loss set-off or carry-forward on VDA transfers.
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Spending BTC, ETH, USDT, or any other cryptocurrency to obtain a gift card is not really “spending cash” in the legal sense. It is better understood as parting with a VDA in exchange for something else. India’s tax framework treats “transfer” broadly, and the government’s own explanation of Section 194S explicitly contemplates VDA transactions where consideration is wholly in kind or structured as an exchange.
This suggests that even a cricket-streaming top-up bought with crypto should be viewed as a disposal users need to account for, even if the purchase itself feels routine. That is an inference from the law’s structure, not a product-specific ruling.
Crypto tax on buying JioHotstar code
The tax may be on gains, but the record-keeping burden is on every spend. In practice, that means an Indian user who bought crypto earlier at one price and later used it to buy a JioHotstar code may need to calculate the INR value at the time of that spend and compare it with the acquisition cost.
If there is income embedded in that transfer, Section 115BBH is the relevant tax provision. Separate from that, Section 194S introduced a 1% TDS mechanism on consideration for VDA transfers, with thresholds of ₹50,000 for specified persons and ₹10,000 for others in a financial year, though how that works in a consumer gift-card flow can depend on the platform’s transaction structure.
That is the real tension in pitches like Onramp’s. Crypto payment companies want to present digital assets as everyday money for subscriptions, shopping, and lifestyle spends. But India still taxes them more like transfer-driven assets than frictionless payment instruments.
For users, the result is that even an IPL recharge paid in crypto may deserve the same record-keeping discipline as a trade.
Why this matters
The bigger issue is not one Hotstar code. It is whether crypto in India can realistically become a daily payments rail while each exit from a token position risks becoming a tax event.
Onramp’s campaign shows the consumer use case is already here. India’s tax regime shows the compliance headache is still here too.
Also Read: India Plans Crypto Monitoring Lab to Track Offshore Exchanges
