WazirX Launches AI Trading Tool and Futures Contracts as 4.4 Million Affected Users Await Full Recovery
India's once-dominant crypto exchange is pitching new products to win back users, but the 14.5% of funds still locked in Recovery Tokens remains the central unresolved question for millions of affected traders.
WazirX, the Indian crypto exchange that lost $235 million to a hack in July 2024, announced an AI-powered trading assistant and a low-cost subscription plan on June 22, 2026, as it works to rebuild market share after resuming operations on October 24, 2025. The attack was later attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group in a January 2025 joint statement from the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
The announcements follow the May 2026 launch of INR-settled perpetual futures contracts, positioning the exchange as a full-service trading platform once again. Whether these products generate enough revenue to repay creditors remains an open question.
The exchange's new AI tool, called WazirX AI, allows users to enter trading instructions in plain language. Founder Nischal Shetty described the functionality to CryptoTimes: "You just tell the AI that you know buy Bitcoin when it drops by 5%." The system can also monitor news and social media to gauge market sentiment.
Alongside the AI tool, WazirX is rolling out a subscription tier called WazirX ZERO, priced at roughly 99 rupees per month (approximately $1.19 USD), which offers unlimited trading for retail users. The pricing is a direct response to India's large base of cost-sensitive retail traders, many of whom had already migrated to offshore platforms such as Binance and OKX following India's 2022 crypto tax regime, with the 2024 hack accelerating that shift.
The futures product, already live since May 13, offers contracts in BTC/INR and ETH/INR pairs with leverage of up to 10 times. The exchange originally offered 20 times leverage during an early-access period in March 2026 before pulling it back.
Maker fees are set at 0.02% and taker fees at 0.04%, which WazirX claims are the lowest among Indian exchanges.
The INR denomination of these contracts matters structurally for Indian users: trading in rupees rather than converting to stablecoins avoids the 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) that India applies to all crypto transfers under Section 194S, a rule introduced in 2022 that significantly raised the real cost of active trading. India's 2022 tax framework also imposes a 30% flat tax on virtual digital asset gains under Section 115BBH, and together these two measures drove many retail traders toward offshore platforms with lower effective costs.
"Futures trading in India has meant high fees unless you are a large-volume institutional trader. We have changed that baseline," Shetty said in May.
The product push comes as WazirX holds roughly 8 to 10% of India's crypto trading market, down sharply from its pre-hack position of 50 to 60%. The exchange formally restarted on October 24, 2025, following approval of its restructuring plan by the Singapore High Court on October 13, 2025. That plan, filed through WazirX's Singapore-registered operating entity Zettai Pte. Ltd., secured 95.7% approval from voting creditors representing 94.6% of total claims.
The path to that approval was not straightforward. A first restructuring plan was rejected by the Singapore High Court in June 2025 on procedural grounds, requiring the exchange to revise and resubmit before securing creditor approval and court sanction in October 2025. The need for court-supervised restructuring reflects the severity of the breach: the hack drained approximately 45% of WazirX's total crypto holdings.
Under the settlement, approximately 85.5% of affected users' portfolio value was distributed in crypto or USDT equivalent within 10 business days of the scheme taking effect.
The remaining 14.5% was converted into non-tradable Recovery Tokens (RTs), issued in January 2026. Those tokens can only be redeemed through quarterly buybacks, and only when WazirX generates at least $10 million in recoverable value per quarter. As of June 22, 2026, the exchange has not publicly confirmed completing a single buyback.
The WRX token, WazirX's native asset, reflects the scale of what the exchange still faces. As of June 22, WRX trades at approximately $0.0236, a decline of roughly 99.6% from its April 2021 all-time high in the range of $5.88 to $5.94.
Its 24-hour trading volume sits at approximately $7,800, with a market cap near $10.79 million and 460 million tokens in circulation, according to CoinGecko (as of June 22, 2026).
At those volumes, the WRX token itself cannot meaningfully drive buyback activity. Revenue from futures fees and AI subscriptions is now the primary realistic path to unlocking funds for the 4.4 million users affected by the hack.
A separate question surrounds Shetty's involvement with other ventures. He co-founded Shardeum, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, and Pi42, a crypto futures exchange that competes directly with WazirX's new futures product.
In February 2026, WazirX listed Shardeum's SHM token and ran a trading contest involving 52.9 million SHM; in March, it partnered with Sikka.fun, a memecoin launchpad built on Shardeum.
The commercial terms of these arrangements have not been publicly disclosed, and creditor advocates have signaled scrutiny of how founder-linked ventures interact with the exchange's operations. In one documented instance, WazirX victims called for Pi42's removal from India Blockchain Week over fund misuse allegations.
India's regulatory environment adds another layer of complexity. Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance convened in May 2026 to examine the future of virtual digital asset regulation, and the Finance Ministry is consulting with SEBI and RBI on a formal classification framework ahead of the Union Budget 2026 to 2027. New reporting obligations that took effect April 1, 2026 require exchanges to share transaction data with tax authorities.
If SEBI moves to formally regulate crypto derivatives, analysts suggest WazirX's early entry into the futures market could give it a compliance advantage over offshore competitors. It could also mean stricter oversight of a product the exchange launched without any formal regulatory framework in place.
WRX price data sourced from CoinGecko as of June 22, 2026. Token prices are volatile and may have changed at time of publication.