Vikaas M. Sachdeva has spent 30 years persuading skeptical investors to try asset classes they didn’t understand. First it was mutual funds in the mid-1990s, when awareness in India was so low that a receptionist once confused his asset management company with an annual maintenance contract provider. Now, as Chief Executive Officer of BitDelta India, a crypto exchange, he is making the same pitch for digital assets.

In an interview with ET Wealth, Sachdeva laid out a blunt comparison: crypto today sits at the same crossroads mutual funds occupied in 1995. The compliance guardrails exist, he said, but the education and market structure built on top of them are still catching up. For anyone watching the crypto space from the…