We Won

After three years of fighting.

After laying off 100 people and watching them cry.

After police took our machines and falsey arrested our co-founders.

After losing everything we built.

We won.

The Supreme Court of India ruled: the banking ban was unconstitutional. All three judges. Unanimous.

Unocoin is back. Banking is restored. Customers are flooding in.

But here's what they don't tell you about winning: you don't forget what losing cost.

I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 in Bangalore.

I was working for a robotics company, helping outfit labs at Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech. I was learning about the future of automation, about innovation, about how technology changes everything.

Then I read nine pages that changed my life.

The Bitcoin white paper.

For the first time, I felt deeply inspired by an idea. Not excited. Not interested. Inspired.

It represented freedom. Financial freedom. Human freedom. Freedom from systems that steal your time by printing money and calling it policy.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I'd been curious about Occupy Wall Street. About Ron Paul's "End the Fed" movement. About why money had to be paper with faces on it when it used to be gold.

Bitcoin had the properties of money. Better properties than anything that came before.

I knew it was going to change the world. I just didn't know how much it would cost to help make that happen.

I started hosting Bitcoin meetups in Bangalore. Every weekend. Nice hotels like Leela Palace.

It was beautiful. Strangers gathering in a faraway place, feeling instant connection because of a shared vision.

We'd throw around ideas. Mine Bitcoin. Blog about it. Build things at the edges.

Then one day, my friend David Johnston asked me: "Is there a platform in India to buy and hold Bitcoin easily?"

No. There wasn't.

So we built one.

Unocoin. December 2013. India's first Bitcoin platform. Launched at the Global Bitcoin Conference we organized ourselves.

My wife is from Colombia. "Uno" means one in Spanish. Bitcoin felt like the one coin that could set everyone free.

We started simple. But people kept showing up with bags of cash, asking to buy Bitcoin.

Cash doesn't scale. So we rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. A proper platform. Banking integration. KYC. The works.

Things moved fast.

Buttercoin recruited me—a Y Combinator company backed by Google Ventures in Palo Alto. I took it. Who turns down Google?

But a year later, Unocoin was taking off in India. Real traction. Real users. Real product-market fit.

Then Barry Silbert invested. The Bruce Wayne of Bitcoin.

I couldn't stay away. I came back.

We grew to 1.5 million users. Nearly 150 employees. Multiple rounds of funding from Blume Ventures, Boost.vc, and others.

In 2017, at our peak, we were onboarding 10,000 users a day.

It was epic.

Then it ended.

The Reserve Bank of India issued a notice. Banks were prohibited from working with crypto companies.

Just like that. No warning. No conversation. Just a notice on a website.

We challenged it. Along with others in the industry. Took it to the Supreme Court.

While we waited for justice, we couldn't operate. We had to lay off 100 people.

I've never cried like that in a professional setting. Watching people who believed in the mission, who worked so hard, leave with broken hearts.

Not a day I want to relive.

We tried something desperate. Bitcoin kiosks.

From first principles, you don't need banks to operate Bitcoin. That's the whole point.

So we thought: work with KYC'd customers. Let them come to our kiosks. Direct access.

We set up a machine in a mall. It wasn't even operational. Our engineers were running tests. Two weeks from launch.

Someone took a picture. Put it online.

It went viral. More viral than anything I've ever seen.

Media picked it up. Frenzy ensued. Confusion about the court case. Then police showed up.

They took the machine. They arrested two of our team members.

Can you believe that? This is a true story.

Our lawyers got them out within a day. The machines weren't operational. We weren't doing anything wrong.

But the damage was done.

Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, offered me a dream job. Head of Global Business Development.

He said something I'll never forget: "Keep your Unocoin shares. If things work out in the future, go back and keep building. If they don't, stay with us."

I see Jesse as the Jesus Christ of crypto. Not kidding. Heart of gold.

I spent a year at Kraken. Learned. Grew. Watched them become the first US-based crypto bank.

But I kept checking on the court case.

Near the end of the trial, the three judges said something crucial.

I'm paraphrasing: "You're all fighting this on the basis of fundamental human rights violations. But you're companies. Show us how a human, not a company, was unjustly impacted."

The wrongful arrest of our co-founders became the evidence.

Real people. Arrested for testing a Bitcoin machine. For trying to give Indians access to financial freedom.

That's how someone's human rights get violated when governments ban the future because they fear it.

The judges ruled in our favor. Unanimous. Unconstitutional.

We won.

Unocoin.com is back in business.

Banking restored. Customers flooding back. Crypto is hot again.

But here's what winning actually looks like:

It looks like the 100 people we laid off, who lost jobs because a central bank decided innovation was threatening.

It looks like the co-founders who got arrested for building machines that weren't even operational.

It looks like three years of legal battles, drained resources, broken momentum.

It looks like entrepreneurs who believed in freedom having to fight their own government to deliver it.

We won. But winning cost everything we built the first time.

Now we're building again. Smarter. Stronger. More resilient.

Because here's what the last three years taught us: if you're building something that threatens centralized control, they will come after you.

The question isn't whether you'll face resistance.

The question is whether you'll fight anyway.

We did. We do. We will.

Bitcoin represents freedom. Building infrastructure for that freedom means fighting for it.

We're still fighting. We're just doing it with banking restored and a Supreme Court victory behind us.

That's what winning looks like when you're building the future.

Welcome back to Unocoin.

We missed you.