India’s Directorate of Enforcement (ED), the country’s financial-crime agency, has renewed its Memorandum of Agreement with the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU) in Gandhinagar for five years. The partnership, first signed in 2021, is designed to strengthen the agency’s technical and investigative capabilities against financial crime through Cyber Forensic Laboratories, advanced forensic tools, capacity building, training and technical support. The ED specifically cited NFSU expertise in digital forensics, malware analysis, network forensics, and crypto and blockchain tracing. The agreement does not establish a separate crypto-forensics unit, grant new legal powers over digital assets, announce a new tracing system, or change India’s digital-asset laws. Its significance for crypto lies in incorporating blockchain-analysis skills into a broader forensic and cybercrime-investigation program, including the ED’s wider responsibilities involving the identification, securing and valuation of seized on-chain assets. The renewal comes as India’s virtual digital asset framework remains fragmented. Since March 2023, specified VDA activities have fallen under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, with covered service providers subject to customer due diligence, record-keeping, transaction monitoring and suspicious-transaction reporting. Transfers of VDAs are also subject to a 30% income tax and a 1% tax deducted at source on specified transactions. The wider regulatory framework remains under development, with a September 16 Finance Ministry hearing and a parliamentary panel chief’s statement that the government was "not accepting VDAs, and is not regulating them either." Recent scrutiny has included parliamentary summonses for Binance, WazirX and ZebPay in May, 44,000 tax notices issued to crypto traders in December 2025, and ED investigations involving a ₹2,500-crore FEMA probe, crypto-linked raids in a multi-state drug case and a Karnataka Bitcoin scam. The ED-NFSU renewal therefore represents continued investment in technical infrastructure, tools and training rather than a new crypto-specific regulatory measure.