The Future of Unocoin
If you’ve been following our story, you know it’s been an interesting one.
We started Unocoin with the singular mission of bringing bitcoin to billions. Nearly ten years in, and it feels like we’re just getting warmed up. Before taking a peek into the future, let’s cover some of our industry’s key highlights and developments.
We launched India’s first bitcoin platform in December 2013 with the initial goal of bridging the divide between bitcoin and India. Our platform is an easy-to-use app that enables users to buy and sell bitcoin, ethereum and other crypto assets.
Along the way, we’ve been laser-focused on bringing utility to our users and offering solutions. Solutions to pay your phone bills, systematically buy bitcoin (i.e. dollar-cost averaging), merchant payment solutions for online and offline services, auto-selling functionality to facilitate remittance, and an industry-leading API allowing businesses across India to plug into our infrastructure programmatically.
We’ve had the honour of serving nearly 2 million users. We are fortunate enough to have a group of incredibly visionary investors such as Barry Silbert, Adam Draper, Max Keiser, Simon Dixon, Tim Draper and countless others supporting our movement.
A few years ago, the central bank issued a blanket bank ban on all bitcoin businesses. Instead of running, we chose to fight this in the supreme court, and after a long legal battle, the supreme court ruled that the bank ban was unconstitutional, and our banking services have been back ever since.
Just because our banking is back, we are not ready to rest on our laurels. We’re actively imagining and re-imagining what the future could look like in a bitcoin-based world.
At the core of our service, we’ve always envisioned enabling people to trade, lend and use bitcoin. The technology to decentralize our platform didn’t exist until recently. In the past few years, there have been exciting projects that fall into the realm of Defi, or decentralized finance.
Given what happened to us in the past, we plan to learn and adapt.
Central to bitcoin’s mission has always been to decentralize money. However, to enable people to buy bitcoin, we’ve had to rely on centralized exchanges such as Unocoin (India) and Coinbase (America).
As demonstrated by our experience, a centralized model is subject to unlawful and unconstitutional banking bans. Unfortunately, that seems to be the least of our worries. In a world that appears to be moving closer and closer to one that resembles 1984, we believe that bringing Satoshi’s vision to the world of finance has never been more critical.
So what happens if the central bank comes after us again? We go to court for another two years and almost lose everything in the process? Perhaps there’s a technological solution to this challenge?
We believe that the very industry that we’ve been ushering into this world also shows us how to decentralize the very essence of finance.
Uniswap has shown that performing an exchange between two counterparties can be done decentralized without an intermediary.
Companies like WazirX have shown the world how a peer-to-peer platform similar to LocalBitcoins can be beautifully married to an order book exchange to simplify the overall user experience. They also showed that in the face of a hostile regulatory environment, peers might connect directly with one another to exchange bitcoin for fiat.
This peer-to-peer model has proven to be much more resilient towards coercive pressures, and we believe that it lays the clues for what lies ahead for Unocoin as well. However, we see several flaws with the WazirX peer-to-peer model, namely, the centralization of the escrow service and infrastructure at large. We can solve this by leveraging smart contracts on top of the bitcoin blockchain.
We’ve also seen Binance come out of nowhere and take market share in a way that no one expected, and they did this all while having their token and continually innovating on the blockchain front by launching Binance chain and the Binance Smart Chain.
Not to mention, Coinbase’s recent IPO has caught the attention of many. Unocoin’s been referred to as the Coinbase of India. It took
Coinbase 8 years to get to where they’re at. It took Binance 4. How do we accomplish something similar in 2 years?
We find ourselves at a crossroad, where we’re now considering a path forward that perhaps looks like a hybrid between Coinbase and Binance.
Knowing what we know, how do we carve out a path to leverage all of the learnings from each of these projects?
Enter, Unocoin 2.0. We will be launching Unocoin 2.0 soon, and we’d like to get your opinion on how we should proceed. We’ll be sharing a white paper very soon, so stay tuned.
Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be sharing more about our plans to open source and decentralize Unocoin. Yep, you heard it here first. This is going to take a lot of effort, and while we’ll help cast a vision that’s compelling and freedom-loving, it’ll need YOU to make it happen.
So stay tuned.