Why Indians Know More About Crypto Than Corporate Bonds

SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey recently pointed to a small but revealing gap in investor awareness. A January 2026 investor survey by the regulator showed that about 15% of Indians recognise cryptocurrency as an investment product, compared with roughly 10% who recognise corporate bonds. The difference is not a judgment on investor sophistication, but a clue to how retail participation is formed.

Most investors do not enter markets through formal constructs such as yield curves, ratings frameworks or coupon structures. Their first exposure typically comes through platforms and products that surface early in the investing journey, where price movement and visibility dominate attention. Crypto appears prominently at this stage. Corporate bonds usually do not.

Corporate bonds occupy a central role in India’s capital markets. They finance infrastructure, refinance corporate balance sheets and channel long-term capital into the economy through defined contractual cash flows. Risk is embedded in credit quality and duration, and outcomes accrue through time rather than transaction frequency. Cryptocurrency operates very differently. It offers no underlying cash flows and is defined primarily by price volatility, with participation framed around asymmetric upside and technological change.

This divergence matters because modern retail investing is shaped by how products are encountered, not only by how they perform. Crypto is distributed through platforms that foreground live prices, alerts and social amplification, encouraging repeated engagement even before fundamentals are considered. Bond investing, by contrast, requires engagement with disclosures, issuer analysis and secondary market liquidity before a transaction can occur.

The asymmetry lies less in risk appetite and more in entry friction, and behavioural finance helps explain why this gap persists.

Frequent Signals
Retail investors consistently gravitate towards instruments that offer frequent signals of activity and a sense of control, even when expected outcomes are weaker. SEBI’s own data on futures and options participation illustrates this clearly. Over 90% of retail traders in derivatives lose money, yet participation continues to rise.

The persistence reflects the structure of the experience, which rewards engagement through continuous decision points rather than long-term outcomes.

Complexity reinforces this tilt as a crypto investment decision is often framed as a simple directional price view, particularly within India’s flat 30% tax regime. Bond investing demands assessment of issuer quality, duration sensitivity, liquidity and credit frameworks, introducing cognitive and procedural friction. Faced with competing products, investors tend to choose those that concentrate effort at entry rather than those that require sustained evaluation over time.

Technology amplifies these behavioural tendencies. Crypto platforms are engineered around immediacy, feedback and social validation. Bond markets still communicate largely through institutional language, periodic disclosures and slower interfaces that prioritise certainty over engagement. Even as regulatory and technological efforts have expanded access to corporate bonds, the core investor experience has remained largely unchanged.

India’s capital market participation has expanded sharply, with unique investors rising from 43 million in 2019–20 to about 139 million today. That growth has been driven by platforms that reduce entry barriers and reward interaction. Bond awareness has not scaled proportionately because the product design continues to assume an investor willing to trade engagement for predictability.