For two decades, the world's most active market for Indian equity derivatives sat in Singapore. A licensing dispute, a negotiated settlement and a new exchange moved it, in a single trading session, to a tower in Gujarat.
Key Takeaways
- For years, price discovery for India's benchmark Nifty index happened offshore: SGX Nifty volumes in Singapore at times exceeded Nifty futures volumes on the NSE itself.
- The February 2018 termination of index-licensing agreements, subsequent arbitration and the negotiated NSE IX–SGX Connect moved the entire market to GIFT City on July 3, 2023: day-one turnover topped $1.21 billion with open interest above $8 billion.
- By June 2026, cumulative turnover had crossed $3.21 trillion, open interest hit a record $21.56 billion, and NSE IX held over 99.6% market share within GIFT IFSC's exchange segment.
- The playbook, genuine leverage over a benchmark plus negotiated interoperability, will be harder to repeat for bonds, single-stock derivatives and bullion, where India holds no comparable leverage.
India's benchmark index is the Nifty 50, yet for many years a substantial share of Nifty futures traded not in Mumbai but on the Singapore Exchange, as SGX Nifty. Foreign investors preferred the SGX platform for its dollar-denominated contracts, longer trading hours and freedom from Indian securities transaction tax, and by the mid-2010s, SGX Nifty volumes at times surpassed those of Nifty futures on the NSE. Price discovery for India's benchmark was happening outside India, and with it went trading fees, clearing revenues and the economic value of market data, all largely beyond the reach of Indian regulators. Similar offshore drift had occurred in commodities and currencies, on venues in Dubai and elsewhere, but the Nifty's significance made SGX Nifty the emblematic case of a wider policy problem.
The Legal Turning Point
The fix began as a legal move, not a market one. In February 2018, NSE, BSE and the Metropolitan Stock Exchange jointly announced they would terminate their index-licensing and data-feed agreements with foreign exchanges, including SGX. SGX contested the move and began listing proprietary India-linked contracts; proceedings reached the Bombay High Court, and arbitration between NSE and SGX ran from 2018 to 2020, with interim orders keeping SGX Nifty trading in the meantime. SEBI and the RBI backed the exchanges, concerned that offshore derivatives activity could feed volatility into the onshore rupee futures market. Regulatory pressure and commercial dispute together created the incentive to settle.
What emerged was a merger of interests rather than a court-imposed outcome. In August 2019, NSE and SGX received approval-in-principle from SEBI and Singapore's MAS for a “Connect” model; in September 2020 they withdrew the arbitration and finalised the tie-up. Under NSE IX–SGX Connect, formally launched by the Prime Minister at GIFT City in July 2022, Nifty derivatives would trade on NSE's international exchange at GIFT City, with SGX permitted to route its Singapore members' orders into the same order book.
A Market Moved in One Session
When the switch came, it came all at once. GIFT Nifty began full-scale trading on NSE IX on July 3, 2023, and by that evening SGX Nifty contracts had shut down for good; Singapore Exchange remained in the picture only as an order-routing gateway, with matching, clearing and regulatory oversight now in India. The scale of the first day made the point on its own: turnover topped $1.21 billion and open interest crossed $8 billion. Three weeks later, single-day turnover set a record of $8.5 billion, more than six times the opening day. This was no trial run; it was an established, already-liquid market transplanted onto Indian soil in a single trading session.
That combination did, in a single trading day, what a decade of policy nudges could not: it brought an entire, already-liquid offshore market back under Indian jurisdiction without driving away the foreign capital that built it.
The Growth Since
The growth since 2023 has been steady rather than one-off. By June 2026, cumulative volume since migration had crossed 69.56 million contracts, cumulative turnover stood above $3.21 trillion, and open interest reached a record 446,150 contracts worth $21.56 billion. NSE IX reported a market share above 99.6% within GIFT IFSC's exchange segment: the migration is close to complete rather than partial. The regulator's numbers confirm the trend from another angle: IFSCA reports average monthly turnover across all IFSC exchanges above $112 billion for the fourth quarter of FY2025–26, with total banking assets in the centre above $111 billion as of March 2026.
Why This Is a Legal Story as Much as a Market One
What changed was not just geography. GIFT Nifty is a contract on an Indian-regulated exchange, cleared primarily through the NSE IFSC Clearing Corporation, with SGX Derivatives Clearing continuing to clear trades from SGX-routed members, all under IFSCA's jurisdiction. Price discovery for the index now sits within reach of an Indian regulator. Foreign investors, meanwhile, lost little in the bargain: NSE IX runs close to 21 hours a day across Asian, European and US sessions and settles in dollars, preserving the access that drew them to Singapore in the first place. And the commercial terms let both exchanges exit an expensive fight without a declared loser: SGX kept a routing role and revenue share; NSE gained the exchange of record and the clearing and data business that comes with it. The broader signal to any exchange or investor weighing GIFT City: Indian regulators are as willing to build joint arrangements with global partners as to compete against them.
What Has Not Moved
The repatriation is not complete. Other India-linked products are taking longer to migrate, and concentration risk is real: a market this reliant on one contract and one exchange, with more than 99% share inside GIFT IFSC, carries its own fragility, even if that risk now sits under Indian jurisdiction rather than foreign. GIFT City's larger ambition of becoming a genuine 24-hour market depends on building liquidity well beyond the index: bond listings, single-stock derivatives and the bullion exchange remain small by comparison, and each will likely need its own version of the SGX Connect.
The lesson for the next phase is about sequencing. The Nifty moved because India held genuine leverage, a benchmark it owned outright, and used legal and regulatory tools to exercise it. Bonds and bullion carry no such built-in leverage, so repeating the outcome will take the same combination of dispute, negotiation and shared infrastructure that made this migration work. Whether GIFT City becomes a diversified 24-hour hub, rather than a one-product success story, depends on whether that playbook can be run again.
