we won

after three years of fighting. after laying off 100 people and watching them cry. after police seized our machines and falsely arrested our co-founders. we won. india’s supreme court ruled the banking ban unconstitutional. unanimous. unocoin is back. banking restored. customers flooding in. but winning doesn’t erase what losing costs.

i discovered bitcoin in 2011 in bangalore. i was working in robotics, thinking about automation and the future. then i read nine pages that changed everything. the bitcoin white paper. not excitement. inspiration. freedom from systems that steal time by printing money and calling it policy. we started meetups. every weekend. strangers bonded by an idea. then someone asked: “is there an easy way to buy bitcoin in india?” there wasn’t. so we built one. unocoin. december 2013. india’s first bitcoin platform. people showed up with bags of cash. cash didn’t scale, so we rebuilt everything.

it worked. 1.5 million users. 150 employees. 10,000 signups a day at the peak. then it stopped.

one notice from the central bank. no warning. no discussion. banks were banned from working with crypto companies. we fought it in court. while waiting, we shut down. laid off 100 people. broke our own hearts. we tried kiosks. first principles. bitcoin doesn’t need banks. a photo leaked. police arrived. machines seized. co-founders arrested. they were released. we did nothing illegal. but the damage was real. we kept fighting. the judges finally asked the right question: show us how a human being was harmed. the arrests were the answer.

unanimous ruling. unconstitutional. we won. but winning looks like lost years, lost jobs, broken momentum. it looks like founders fighting their own government to build the future. now we’re back. smarter. tougher. more resilient.because if you build something that threatens centralized control, resistance is guaranteed. the only real choice is whether you keep going. we did. we do. we will. bitcoin is freedom. building infrastructure for freedom means fighting for it. welcome back to unocoin.

we missed you.