My Unocoin Story

I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I was raised by East Indian parents from Kolkata. I studied electrical engineering nearly 20 years ago. I’ve spent the vast majority of the past 20 years living in Toronto.

After graduating and getting my first engineering job, I started to realize that life is really hard. After the income I would take home, there would always be more month than money. It was frustrating and so I set out to understand money.

I thought that the best option for me to learn about money would be to become a financial advisor. So, I did. I went out and got all of my licenses. At the end of that multi-year journey, I felt that I understood less about money than I did At the beginning of this process.

I felt like I was surrounded by “advisors” who used fancy words and fake math to trick people into making a commission for themselves. I also felt confused by concepts such as inflation and money printing. eventually, I felt disgusted and wanted out. I knew at the time that I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I wasn’t ready for it yet. After reading a book by robert kiyosaki titled rich dad poor dad I started to realize that learning how to sell was going to be imperative to my future aspirations.

So for the next 8 years, I worked as an Academic Advisor (sales / business development role) at a leading-edge robotics company called Quanser. During this time, I had a chance to visit some of the most amazing robotic labs in the world. In 2011, on behalf of this company, I moved out to Bangalore. i entered this role to cultivate my ability to sell, i left with an education on that and also got to see into the future of robotics. I also left with a healthy appreciation for and understanding of innovation. I had a chance to help outfit robotics lab at stanford, georgia tech, MIT, iit, etc.

at one point, around 2011, the ceo of the company asked if I’d be open to moving to India to help drive growth. so, i did. around this time, I stumbled upon the bitcoin white-paper and became obsessed with the idea. For the first time in my life, I felt so deeply inspired by an idea. In short, it represented freedom. I just couldn’t get enough of it.

prior to discovering bitcoin, i was curious about topics such as occupy wallstreet and ron paul’s end the fed movement. I learned that money didn’t have to be pieces of paper with people’s faces on it. i learned that money used to be gold. i learned that bitcoin had many of the properties of money and was destined to grow into this role for the world.

After spending nearly 6 months in hibernation and learning all that I could about the technology, I finally started to see what was happening online. I saw that there were people such as Anthony Diiorio (who eventually went on to become one of the cofounders of ethereum) who were hosting bitcoin meetups in Toronto and I felt like I was missing out. I wanted to start my own bitcoin meetups in Bangalore! so, i did.

I loved running bitcoin meetups every weekend at really nice hotels such as Leela palace. It was fun to gather with like-minded people in a faraway place but then feel an instant connection with them because of a shared vision.

We’d meet regularly, throw around ideas we were passionate about, and started to tinker around the edges of the technology: mining, conferences, physical bitcoin, blogging, etc. Then, finally, one day, I was speaking with David Johnston, a good friend and crypto OG, asked me over a call: is there a platform in India to buy, sell and hold bitcoin easily? I said no. An idea was born.

My wife is from Colombia and so I’ve been learning how to speak Spanish. Uno means one in spanish. It really felt like bitcoin had this quality of one-ness. It felt like it could be the one coin that could set everyone free. I’d picked up the domain unocoin.com some time back and initially, we maintained a simple wordpress blog which acted as an information resource mainly for people who were coming to our meetups.

It was one place where people could go to learn about the latest news, etc. People kept coming to our meetups with bags full of cash asking to buy bitcoin. Given that I’d spent some time in the financial industry many years prior, I knew that working with cash was probably not long term sustainable or scalable.

So while sitting with Sathvik, Harish and Abhi, we decided that we’d rebuild Unocoin from scratch to be India’s first bitcoin platform. We decided that we’d launch the service at an event that we organized called the Global Bitcoin Conference in December 2013. At the time, I was still working at Quanser but then something really cool happened.

In preparing for and promoting the conference, the CEO of a company called Buttercoin had reached out. He initially reached out to be a speaker at our conference, but we quickly started talking about getting more involved with their company. They were based in Palo Alto, California, and was just finishing up their time at the world-famous incubator Y Combinator. Not to mention, they had just landed Google Ventures as an investor.

Given my background, I was offered the role of Head of Business Development and I accepted. How could I turn down this golden opportunity to work for a company backed by Google? I couldn’t! After working there for nearly a year, the tiny project we’d started back in India, called Unocoin, was really starting to take off. Not only were we seeing immediate traction and product-market fit, we also accepted a round of financing from Barry Silbert - I like to refer to him as the Bruce Wayne of Bitcoin.

Once Barry invested, I couldn’t help but return to Unocoin. Sathvik, as CEO, was quick to accept me back into the team and we got to work. over a period of a few years, We eventually grew our user-base to nearly 1.5 million users, had nearly 150 employees, landed a second round of financing from reputable investors such as Blume Ventures, Boost.vc, FundersClub, Future Perfect Ventures, Bank to the Future, 2020 Ventures and several others.

In 2017, at our peak, we were onboarding more than 10,000 users a day. It was epic. Soon after, however, things turned for the worse. The RBI, the central bank in India, issued a notice on their website which prohibited banks from working with crypto companies such as ours. It was really sad.

We decided that what was happening is not fair. We decided to stand up. So did many others within the community. Under a common umbrella, the industry challenged the RBI in the supreme court. Due to the fact that during this time we were unable to operate, we eventually had to lay off nearly 100 people. Tears were shed. Hearts were broken. Not a day I’d like to relive.

Eventually, I had to make the hard decision to part ways with Unocoin. With things lingering in court, a ruling seemed an eternity away. Thanks to yearly events that Barry had been hosting for his founders, I had a relationship with Jesse, the CEO of Kraken.

I remember meeting Jesse at one of the DCG events and he asked me about the situation in India. I told him that things looked grim but that we were still hopeful. I also shared with him an incredibly interesting idea that we were exploring at the time around launching bitcoin kiosks around the country to help our 1.5 million customers to get access to crypto.

From a first-principles perspective, you really don’t need a bank to operate with bitcoin. So why not simply work with KYC’d customers only and have them go to our kiosks? Well that didn’t turn out so well. One thing led to another and we ended up getting in trouble for those kiosks. We had setup a machine in a mall, it wasn’t even operational, we were going to launch it in 2 weeks, our engineers were running tests.

Someone saw our machine with our branding and decided to take a picture of it and put it on the internet. And the internet did with it what it does best, it went viral. I’ve never seen anything go so viral in my life.

The media picked it up and then it became a frenzy. One thing led to another and then the added confusion around the ongoing court case caused the police to come and take away our machine along with two of our team members. Can you believe that? This is a true story…

Within a day, our lawyers had them out and given that our machines weren’t even operational, there was no way we could’ve been doing anything wrong. I mention this story mainly to clear up confusion around it. if you have further questions about this incident, leave them below in the comments section.

with things really not going our way, I decided to reach out to jesse to see if they needed help with kraken. he was nice enough to offer me a dream job as Head of global business development of kraken. he also said something to me that I’ll never forget: he said that I could come join kraken and hold onto my shares at Unocoin. he continued: if things work out for unocoin 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. the guy has a heart of gold. they recently announced that they will be the first us based crypto bank. So proud of their team and happy that I got to spend nearly a year with them.

Fast-forwarding to a few months ago, if you haven’t heard, unocoin ended up winning the court case against the RBi. All three judges ruled in our favour! So not only did the Unocoin team fund more than half the legal battle, it was also Harish, one of unocoin’s cofounders who was a central figure in the court case itself. Allow me to explain.

Near the end of the long trial, the three judges said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “ok, so you all are fighting this bank ban on the basis of a fundamental violation of human rights. But the challenge we see here is that you all are companies. Show us an example of how a human, not a company, was unjustly impacted by this.”

It was the wrongful arrest of our cofounders that were then brought up and used as evidence to show a clear example of how someone’s human rights were violated due to the banking ban that enabled us to win in court.

Anyway, if you haven’t heard, Unocoin.com is now back in business! Customers are flooding back and crypto is now hot again. We’re really happy to be here to support the community and I’d like to thank all our customers for supporting us along the way. Without you, none of this would be possible. Secondly, thanks to our investors. Third, thanks to the entire Unocoin family for working so hard each and every day.