Selling bitcoin in India in 2013 meant explaining it to people who walked away after two minutes. Sathvik Vishwanath did it anyway, and co-founded Unocoin, which grew into one of the country’s best-known crypto platforms.
He joined The Builders Club to talk through the early years, the banking restriction that nearly starved the company of revenue, and where crypto in India goes next.
How did Unocoin build crypto in India from scratch? Sathvik Vishwanath’s story
Sathvik’s story starts with a personal pain point. Earning money in a virtual world called Second Life, he lost roughly seven percent to conversion and transfer fees and waited over a week for payments, which pushed him toward bitcoin and then to a Bangalore meetup where he met his future co-founders.
Unocoin launched in December 2013 as a platform for Indians to buy and sell bitcoin. It later added a merchant gateway, an exchange with around forty tokens and a lending platform, and serves about fifteen lakh Indians with a team of about forty-five.
- Solve your own problem. High fees and slow transfers led to the idea.
- Education is the first job. Most people had never heard of bitcoin.
- Regulation can freeze a business. The company ran on almost no revenue for 22 to 23 months.
- Be cautious with customers’ money. Unocoin lists new tokens carefully.
How did Sathvik Vishwanath get into bitcoin?
Sathvik studied engineering, did side jobs such as building websites for call centres, worked as a programmer analyst at Cognizant and then completed an MBA at Melbourne Business School. While there he wrote custom scripts in Second Life and earned its in-world currency.
Converting that money to dollars and then to rupees cost him around seven percent every month. Looking for a cheaper and faster route, he found bitcoin.
- He met Unocoin’s other founders at a Bangalore bitcoin meetup in 2012-13.
- Global peers such as Coinbase, Bitstamp and Mt. Gox showed there was a gap in India.
- Unocoin launched in December 2013.
What were the biggest challenges of starting a crypto exchange in India?
Education came first. About ninety percent of people did not know what bitcoin was, and if the team could not explain it in a short pitch, they lost the prospect.
There was also no precedent. The founders had to guess how to run KYC, what security to build and how the platform should work, while officials were still working out how to categorise and tax crypto.
- Explaining bitcoin to a mass audience.
- Unclear rules on tax and classification.
- Building security and compliance without a template.
- Surviving the banking restriction between 2018 and 2020.
How did Unocoin survive the banking restriction?
Between 2018 and 2020, a restriction on banks serving crypto companies meant Unocoin struggled for about 22 to 23 months with almost no revenue. The team kept energy and resources aside to fight the case at the Supreme Court and then return to business.
Sathvik says officials now understand the sector far better, and regulators, from tax to enforcement, deal with it openly.
Will bitcoin ever become less volatile?
Sathvik says volatility has already fallen. In 2014 a single piece of news from China could drop the price by half in minutes, while today the move is closer to five percent, and daily swings of two to three percent are normal.
He estimates it could take another six to eight years to reach swings of around half a percent a day, as the market grows larger and deeper. He expects bitcoin to behave more like gold, a store of value, and other coins to handle daily payments.
Why does a bigger market mean steadier prices?
More participants and a larger market cap make it harder for any single player with deep pockets to move the price.
How safe are crypto exchanges, DeFi and NFTs?
Sathvik admits another Mt. Gox-style failure can happen, since exchanges are attractive hacking targets. He notes that today’s exchanges use cold storage, have in-house security teams and hold a much smaller share of global volume.
On DeFi, he calls smart-contract platforms risky because few users read the contracts, and hacks yield money directly. He is also doubtful about NFTs, saying there may not be enough end buyers, though Unocoin may add a marketplace for swaps.
- Diversification idea: about half in bitcoin, a quarter in tokens with a year of real use, and a quarter for high-risk bets.
- Only a few NFT and DeFi projects are likely to last.
What does the future of crypto regulation and Unocoin look like?
Sathvik expects regulation to arrive because exchanges today set their own KYC and tax handling. Without rules, he warns that exchanges could list any coin, and ordinary investors would lose out.
Unocoin has been cautious about aggressively marketing to the middle class and about which tokens it lists. It runs an education portal called Unoversity and plans to add features such as lending and wealth management once rules are firmer. For background on the technology, see Bitcoin on Wikipedia.
Further reading and sources
Frequently asked questions
What is Unocoin?
Unocoin is an Indian crypto platform co-founded by Sathvik Vishwanath that launched in December 2013 to let Indians buy and sell bitcoin. It has since added an exchange, a merchant gateway and a lending platform.
Will crypto prices stay volatile?
Sathvik says volatility is already lower than in the early days and expects it to keep falling as the market grows. He thinks it could take six to eight years to reach a much calmer range, though sentiment shocks will still occur.
How should a beginner split money across crypto assets?
Sathvik’s rough suggestion was about half in bitcoin, a quarter in tokens with real use cases built over a year, and a quarter for risky bets. This is his personal view, not financial advice, and you should do your own research.
Conclusion
Sathvik’s journey shows how a founder can build in a market with no rules and little awareness: educate patiently, be careful with customer money and be ready to survive long regulatory delays.
If you are building in an emerging category, budget for education and for months of uncertainty, and treat compliance as part of the product.
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