it was a tuesday in April 2018.
i was in Toronto. it was 2am there. my phone wouldn't stop. unocoin's WhatsApp groups were on fire. then a voice memo from Bangalore came through: check the news. now.
the Reserve Bank of India had just issued a circular.
every regulated bank in India was being ordered to sever ties with crypto businesses. effective immediately. our banking partners — every one — would be cut off in a matter of weeks.
translation: India's largest bitcoin exchange could no longer move money.
we'd built the company for seven years. by that morning, every one of those years was suddenly worth nothing. the RBI had walked into Sathvik and Harish's living room — they were the ones in Bangalore running the company day to day — and turned off the lights.
i stared at the ceiling in Toronto for a long time. across the world, my co-founders were already on the phones, already in the office, already deciding what to do next.
that's where this story really starts. not with me.
India didn't need another exchange. it needed a parallel system.
i'd been deep in bitcoin since 2011. read the white paper. ran the early node software. watched the price move from $30 to $1,000 to $200 to $1,000 again.
most of my engineering peers thought it was a scam. some thought it was a curiosity. nobody i talked to in India thought it was a foundational asset.
but if you'd lived through the Indian financial system the way i had — the demonetization that hadn't happened yet but felt inevitable, the inflation that ate your grandparents' savings, the capital controls that kept the rupee weak — you saw what bitcoin actually was. not a stock. not a hedge. a parallel system.
India has 1.4 billion people. it had functioning fintech, growing internet penetration, and a population that already understood gold and informal stores of value. it didn't have one thing: a way to plug into bitcoin without a bank gating the on-ramp.
so we built it. we called it Unocoin. uno — one. one country. one bitcoin company.
"the math was on our side. we just had to outlast."
Sathvik and Harish ran the country while I ran the diaspora.
i wish i could tell you it was steady, methodical work. it wasn't.
the first eighteen months were Sathvik and Harish learning fintech from textbooks while shipping product. running KYC by hand. arguing with Indian banks. doing customer support at 2am because there was nobody else. they were the ones living it day in, day out, in Bangalore.
my role was different. i was the diaspora arm. global investors, Silicon Valley relationships, partnerships outside India. but the company itself — the people, the product, the regulatory grind — was theirs.
we were first. and "first" matters when you're building infrastructure for a country.
by 2014 we'd raised a small seed round. by 2015 we had 50,000 users. by 2017 we'd done two more rounds — Draper Associates, Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Blume Ventures, Funders Club. names that gave us air cover when we needed it most.
and by early 2018, we had over a million users and a team of 150.
we were the trusted brand. India's first bitcoin exchange. backed by Silicon Valley names. profitable. growing. legitimate.
then April hit.
they couldn't ban Bitcoin. so they came for the founders.
here's the thing most people don't understand about regulatory force: it doesn't have to be illegal. it just has to be effective.
the RBI didn't ban bitcoin. they couldn't — bitcoin's a protocol, not a company. you can't regulate math.
what they could do was ban banking access. and they did. one circular. one signature. every regulated bank in the country had three months to sever ties with anyone in the crypto business. no warning. no consultation. no committee.
the bank notifications started arriving within days. as per the RBI circular dated 6 April 2018, your account will be closed effective...
cancellation after cancellation. by June, the payment rails were gone. customers couldn't fund accounts. couldn't withdraw. couldn't trade.
seven years of work. over a million users. 150 employees. all of it stranded behind a bureaucratic wall built in twenty-four hours.
Sathvik and Harish had to lay people off. apologize to investors. write a public letter to users explaining what had happened. they did all of that on the ground in Bangalore while still running what was left of the business.
and then, in October 2018, the police came for them.
Sathvik and Harish were arrested. it was over a bitcoin ATM kiosk we'd briefly piloted. they were taken in by the cyber crime unit. the news ran their photos. the message to every other crypto founder in India was unmistakable: don't get clever.
most founders, faced with that, would have folded the company by the end of the week. nobody could have blamed them.
they didn't.
"the easy choice was to fold. they didn't take it."
Sathvik and Harish made the call I will never forget.
there's a moment every founder faces when the existential threat is real.
three options were on the table:
flee. wind down. relocate to Singapore. let the company die quietly. preserve what was left of the team's careers.
fold. pivot. become something else. a payments company, an enterprise blockchain consultancy, a job board. anything that didn't get you arrested again.
fight. sue the central bank of India.
the third option was insane. you don't sue the RBI in India. you don't sue any central bank anywhere if you want to keep your reputation, your access, your peace of mind. and the people who would face the worst of it — the legal exposure, the personal risk, the next set of cyber crime visits — were the people sitting in Bangalore.
those people were Sathvik and Harish.
they had every reason to choose flee or fold. they'd already been arrested once. they had families. they had reputations to protect. they had Silicon Valley investors who would have understood — and even quietly preferred — a graceful wind-down. nobody on Earth would have thought less of them for taking the safe road.
they chose fight.
not because they were fearless. they weren't. they were as scared as anyone would be. they chose it because they believed the RBI's action was unconstitutional — that the Indian constitution guarantees the right to do business, that the RBI didn't have the legal authority to ban an entire industry by circular, that they'd overreached.
and they understood something most founders in their position would have missed: if they let it stand, every other founder in India — payments, fintech, mobility, robotics, anything new — would be building under the same shadow.
so they joined the Internet and Mobile Association of India and filed in the Supreme Court.
two founders. just out of cyber crime detention. suing the central bank of their own country in the highest court in the land.
my job from Toronto was to back them with everything i had: capital, calls, cover. but the call to fight — and the courage to live with it — was theirs.
they ran a marathon in courtrooms while everyone else moved on.
the petition was filed in mid-2018. the first hearings were late 2018. the petitioners argued. the RBI's lawyers argued. the bench took everything under advisement. weeks passed. months passed.
every quarter we'd think: this might be the verdict. and every quarter, the bench would adjourn for more documents, more evidence, more time.
Sathvik and Harish ran the company in the meantime — on a skeleton crew, with broken payment rails, with most of their peers in the Indian crypto industry having already given up. they found workarounds. they limped. they kept what was left of the team alive.
they sat in those courtrooms. they coordinated with counsel. they fielded the press. they took the calls from worried users and worried employees and worried investors. for two years.
i made hundreds of trips between Toronto and Bangalore to back them up — but the daily grind, the legal exposure, the personal weight of being the named co-founders on a case against the central bank — they carried that.
some people we'd hired in 2017 left because they couldn't keep waiting. some stayed because Sathvik and Harish wouldn't let them give up.
and the whole time, the message back to the team was the same: the math is on our side. the constitution is on our side. we just have to outlast.
March 4, 2020. unanimous.
the bench delivered. unanimous.
the RBI's circular was struck down as unconstitutional. the right to trade in cryptocurrency was upheld. banks were ordered to restore access. exchange operators across the country were vindicated.
Sathvik and Harish had won.
the news rippled through Indian fintech twitter within hours. they got messages from every direction — clients lost long ago, employees who'd left, founders who'd been quietly building elsewhere. you actually did it.
they did. and three weeks later, the country was in covid lockdown — and bitcoin was about to enter the wildest run of its history. India's bitcoin economy was open for business again, just in time. every Indian crypto founder, exchange, fund, and developer who's built anything since March 4, 2020 owes a quiet debt to the two people who refused to fold in October 2018.
if Sathvik and Harish had taken either of the two safe roads, India's bitcoin sector would have lost three years it can never get back. that's not hyperbole. that's the counterfactual.
"the worst outcome isn't losing.
it's giving up before the verdict."
seven lessons from their courage.
i wasn't the one in cyber crime detention. i wasn't the one whose name was on the petition. i wasn't the one carrying the daily weight of being a public face of a fight against the central bank.
but i had a front-row seat to the people who were. here's what watching Sathvik and Harish taught me — and what i'd write to any founder who's about to face their version of April 6:
- regulators attack the chokepoints, not the protocol. they can't kill bitcoin. they can kill bitcoin businesses. design your company with regulatory pressure baked in from day one.
- constitutions are slow but they work. the rule of law is a feature of countries with functioning courts. India has those. founders building in jurisdictions without them are taking a different kind of risk.
- you don't fight a regulator with PR. you fight with law. Sathvik and Harish didn't run press tours. they ran a court case. the difference matters.
- the bench cares about facts and precedent, not narrative. every hearing, they showed up over-prepared. they let the law do the work.
- some battles are existential. some are strategic. learn the difference. the RBI case was existential. losing meant the company — and a generation of Indian crypto founders — died with it. once you know which fight you're in, your decisions get clearer.
- courage is mostly a refusal to take the easy exit. Sathvik and Harish weren't fearless. they had every reason to fold. they didn't. that's the only definition of courage that has ever held up under pressure.
- the worst outcome isn't losing. it's giving up before the verdict. the founders who folded in 2018 don't get the win Sathvik and Harish earned in 2020. that's the most expensive lesson in this whole thing.
your version of April 6 is coming.
i'm not telling you this story to flex. i'm telling you because the courage Sathvik and Harish showed in 2018 deserves to be remembered — and because if you're building anything ambitious in 2026, you will face a version of what they faced.
maybe not a central bank. maybe a platform shutting off your distribution. an executive order changing your category. a competitor with infinite legal budget. an investor who tries to take the company. some moment where the easy choice is to fold and the hard choice will haunt you if you don't take it.
what watching Sathvik and Harish in India taught me is that the founders who win aren't the ones who avoid the fight. they're the ones who prepare for it before it starts, choose it deliberately when it comes, and outlast everyone in the room when they do. the courage isn't loud. it's just the refusal to walk away.
if you're staring at your own version of April 6 right now, i'd be honoured to be in your corner. you know where to find me. and if you ever get to meet Sathvik or Harish — buy them a drink. they earned it for all of us.