In this episode of Bitcoin Stories, Sunny Ray reconnects with Vishal Gupta, whom he first met at an early Bitcoin meetup in Mumbai back in 2013. Before discovering cryptocurrency, Vishal ran a taxi advertising business and was largely detached from his family's diamond trade. He recalls dismissing Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme after a friend introduced him to it on Facebook, a debate that ultimately opened his mind rather than closed it. Over the next twelve to fourteen months, Vishal studied blockchain technology deeply, moving past price speculation to conviction in its long term potential. He went on to organize dozens of Mumbai meetups, connecting techies and finance professionals during Bitcoin's quiet 2014 to 2015 years, and crossed paths with figures like Vitalik Buterin and Anthony Di Iorio at Bangalore gatherings. The conversation traces his path from SearchTrade.com to his latest venture, Tag Protocol, which turns Twitter hashtags into NFTs. Vishal remains skeptical of Bitcoin's current valuation, insisting technology, not price, is what ultimately matters, while embracing the culture and communities crypto has built along the way.
A former Bitcoin skeptic turned believer traces his path from Ponzi scheme doubts to building NFT and crypto products.
Where does your story begin, before Bitcoin?
Before Bitcoin, he ran a taxi advertising company he started in 2008. He had always been an outlier in his family's diamond business and never got deeply involved with it. By 2012 his advertising business was struggling, sales were dropping, and he began exploring other opportunities, which is when he discovered Bitcoin.
How did you first hear about Bitcoin?
A school friend living in America kept posting about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency on Facebook. Vishal argued with him for about a week, insisting it was some kind of Ponzi scheme and that his friend would lose money. His friend never fully convinced him, but the debate gave him enough material to question his own dismissive instincts.
What was your first real hesitation about Bitcoin, beyond calling it a Ponzi scheme?
Seeing something grow exponentially in value naturally made him suspicious something was wrong. Once he focused on the technology, especially blockchain, consensus, and decentralization, his perspective shifted. Back in 2013 there was little material online to learn from, so understanding it took real effort, roughly twelve to fourteen months to fully grasp.
How did you move from skepticism to actually building conviction and investing?
It came down to conviction, the more he understood, the more convinced he became. After the 2013 crash and the quiet years of 2014-15, he stopped caring about valuation and focused on believing in the technology as transformative. He felt that if a technology has a real use case, value would eventually follow, so he started accumulating and building.
What was the Bitcoin meetup scene like in Mumbai during those years?
He ended up organizing around 20 to 30 meetups during that period. Groups were largely tech people curious about blockchain and finance people trying to figure out how to classify or speculate on Bitcoin. The meetups stayed focused on top-line fundamentals rather than deep technical discussion, but they attracted a lot of interesting people.
What projects have you worked on since then?
His first venture was SearchTrade.com, which attached keyword search volume from Google to a mining process. More recently he launched Tag Protocol, which turns Twitter hashtags into NFTs people can own as collectibles, alongside a native cryptocurrency called Stack, where users earn Stack Points based on trader performance.
What's one thing you believe that most Bitcoiners would disagree with?
He's still not convinced Bitcoin's valuation is justified, he thinks it's way overpriced and that people focus too much on price action instead of the underlying technology. He believes technology, not price, is what resolves real problems long term, though he doesn't judge people who speculate on other coins or meme tokens.
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