A SaaS company shows ₹2 crore in annual revenue on its books. Its cloud bills, product usage and subscriber count suggest a business 5 times that size.

Where did the rest of the money go? Increasingly, the answer is: stablecoins.

Some SaaS providers are now receiving the bulk of their subscription revenue in USDC or USDT while declaring only what flows through banks, cards and conventional payment gateways. In the higher-risk cases, as much as 80–90% of revenue moves through wallets controlled by the company, its promoters, employees or related entities.

Let us take a simple illustration to understand how this works.

How this works

Sid runs a SaaS startup selling an AI-powered analytics tool. Subscriptions cost $99 per month.

On the pricing page, customers see the usual options: card, PayPal, bank transfer. But during onboarding, the sales team makes a quiet offer: "Pay in USDT and get 20% off. Here's our wallet address."

Customers love a discount. Many take it.

Now watch what happens to the money:

1. The stablecoins land in a wallet controlled by the company's owners or employees.
2. The company uses the same stablecoins to pay the its expenses directly: cloud hosting, AI and API credits, domains and software subscriptions, developers and contractors, advertising and other digital services. Many of these vendors happily accept crypto.
3. Only the revenue that arrived through cards and bank transfers gets recorded as turnover. The crypto revenue,  and the crypto expenses it funded, never touch the books.

The business runs at full size. The books show a fraction of it. Simply put, an entire parallel company operates off-ledger.

What's the actual tax exposure?

1. Suppression of business turnover and income.
2. GST evasion on supplies to Indian customers.
3. Incorrect export or zero-rating claims.
4. VAT or sales-tax exposure in foreign markets, depending on customer type and place-of-supply rules.
5. Unreported virtual-asset holdings and transfers.
6. Off-book payments to contractors and related parties.
7. And false invoices, accounts or expense records to hold the whole thing together.

Each one compounds the others. A GST officer, an income-tax officer and a foreign VAT authority can all be looking at the same wallet for different reasons.

The red flags investigators look for

A SaaS business can hide revenue, but it cannot hide usage.

Every subscriber generates activation logs, API calls, support tickets and server load. So investigators must look for mismatches:

1. Active subscribers or usage levels inconsistent with declared revenue.
2. Subscription activations with no corresponding invoices.
3. Wallet addresses shared in payment emails, support chats or onboarding material.
4. Recurring stablecoin receipts that match subscription prices.
5. Stablecoin payments flowing out to hosting, API or software providers.
6. Promoter or employee wallets paying company expenses.
7. Cloud and infrastructure costs disproportionate to reported turnover.
8. Large gaps between product usage data and tax filings.

Where the evidence lives

1. Subscription and customer databases
2. Billing and activation logs
3. CRM and support records
4. Cloud-hosting and API dashboards
5. Emails and internal communications
6. Wallet and exchange records
7. Bank statements
8. GST, VAT and income-tax filings

The investigative objective

1. Reconstruct gross revenue from customer records, product usage and blockchain transactions.
2. Identify the beneficial owners of the relevant wallets: company, promoter, employee or related entity.
3. Classify supplies as domestic or cross-border, because the GST and VAT treatment turns on it.
4. Quantify the undeclared turnover, income and tax liability.