Hartej Sawney shares his winding path from a New Jersey childhood as a first generation Indian American to becoming a leading voice in blockchain security. After studying finance at Penn State, he rejected Wall Street to run a food truck while teaching himself to code and immersing in the Y Combinator startup world. While caring for his father through a long battle with brain cancer, he was accepted into Startup Chile, a turning point that led him to Santiago, Buenos Aires, and eventually Las Vegas, where he built a mobile POS startup and fell in with Bitcoin's early community. Surrounded by pioneers like Joe Sub Kwan, he went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole before becoming captivated by Ethereum's smart contract potential. This led him to co-found Hosho, a top blockchain security auditing firm, and later Zokyo, spanning cybersecurity, development, and DeFi. Sawney reflects on finding community and belonging through crypto, and speaks candidly about India's regulatory struggles, freedom, and the philosophical alignment he found within the Bitcoin and crypto world.
From a Penn State food truck to auditing Ethereum's biggest ICOs, Hartej Sawney's Bitcoin origin story is anything but ordinary.
Can you share your story before you got into Bitcoin?
I was born and raised in central New Jersey to Indian immigrant parents with high expectations. I studied finance at Penn State but instead of Wall Street, I ran a halal style food truck while teaching myself to code and diving into the Y Combinator startup world. I wanted to attract technical cofounders and build something amazing.
What happened with your father during this time?
My father had brain cancer for six years and I moved home to be his home nurse while learning to code. I got accepted into Startup Chile, an equity free accelerator, the day after he passed away. It was a relief after such a dark period, and my mother gave me her blessing to go to Santiago.
How did you end up in the Bitcoin community?
After Chile I moved to Argentina, then Las Vegas to keep building my POS startup. There I met people like Joe Sub Kwan who were deeply into Bitcoin, and I fell into that friend circle. My roommate Fodejo and I went down the rabbit hole together, reading Satoshi's white paper and Nick Szabo essays.
How did Hosho come about?
A group of us personally investing in Ethereum realized people with cybersecurity and white hat hacker backgrounds needed to audit blockchain and smart contract code. We built Hosho with Joe Sub Kwan, grew it to number one blockchain security firm, hit four million in revenue in weeks, and scaled to 37 employees before pivoting after the 2018 bear market.
What was it about Ethereum that captured your imagination?
Ethereum became like WordPress for the internet, easy and fast to ship smart contracts even if not the most secure. For functional payments and actually spending tokens rather than just storing value, Ethereum had more attraction than Bitcoin at the time, though every blockchain has its own unique use cases.
Do you think Bitcoin will ever have Turing complete smart contract capability like Ethereum?
I'm torn on this. Part of me thinks Bitcoin was never meant to do some of these things and that's fine as a store of value. But seeing progress on the Lightning Network makes me think it could become so much more, even though Lightning itself is really a layer two focused on fast, secure payments rather than programmable contracts.
What's your take on India's crypto ban attempts?
I don't think it will move forward much further. I have faith in 1.4 billion Indians and in people like Unocoin's founders who paid lawyers out of pocket for years to fight the RBI. Now that Sequoia backed Indian exchanges exist, international VCs have skin in the game too, so the pressure against banning crypto is much stronger.
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