Unocoin is India’s leading Bitcoin & Blockchain company. Mission is to make it super easy for users to buy, sell, store, use and accept bitcoin in India. It is one of the leading innovators in the Bitcoin space and has released numerous services for users. Few services include Merchant Gateway, Auto-sell, Mobile App, Systematic Buy Plan, Over the counter trading etc. Unocoin has been doing very well and is presently growing at the rate of 20% month over month.
HERE IS A VIEW ON BITCOIN FROM SUNNY RAY, the co-founder of Unocoin.
1.Can you tell us a bit more about your background and who you are?
Yes absolutely so, my name is Sunny. Originally I was born in Canada and my parents are from India and I studied Electrical Engineering in University of Alberta and University of Toronto, I spent a few years in running a financial brokerage and after that I joined a robotic company in Canada and for 8 years I essentially sold Robots all over the world in different universities. To IIT’s & MIT’s and all of the top-end institutions and then about 5 years ago I was living in India for that Robotic company and I discovered bitcoins around 2011. Because I spent time in the financial industry a long time ago, when I first came across bitcoin, it struck me as something that was revolutionary. Bitcoin held the solution for a lot of the world’s problems, especially when it comes to money and finance.
2.How did u first come across bitcoin?
When I was in the financial service industry a long time ago and when i was in financial service, I couldn’t help ask lots of questions I had about money. When i first heard about bitcoin in 2011-12, initially I didn’t think much of it. As I started reading more about it, I found Bitcoin technology very interesting and the future bitcoin could hold. So what happened is that after spending 6 months reading and learning about it, I heard something about meetup group in India in Bangalore i.e, meetup.com. India bitcoin, one of the largest bitcoin meetup group in India today and the idea behind it was to get together lots of different types of people in India, interested in bitcoin and then to explore the opportunity. Through that I met the founder of Unocoin, Sathvik, Abhinand and Harish and that was how I initially got into bitcoin.
3.What was the idea behind bitcoin startup (Unocoin) ?
Yea, that’s a good question. We really had too many ideas in the beginning, we just knew, we were passionate about bitcoin. As a beginning, we started different meetups, trying different things, so for example we used to run an Indian bitcoin mining operation. We through a bitcoin global conference and like this we tried physical bitcoins as well. We tried a lot of different opportunities then the thing we realized is that, it’s not easy to find a business opportunity. So, through trial and error, through experience we could learn the opportunities which make sense, but some don’t. But one thing while we had this meetup group, is that I was maintaining a website group called Unocoin and really the purpose at that time was just to offer people information. Few people in India knew about bitcoin, but around 3.5 years ago, we came up with an idea of turning unocoin into a trading platform. A place where people in India could buy and sell bitcoin, from the comfort of their home or from their mobile phone and really the reason we were passionate about that we is because we wanted a system like that first in india. Because i’m originally from Canada, I was aware of different platforms around the world, where we could buy and sell Bitcoins. But at that time we started Unocoin, there was nothing like that available in India. So we really thought, hey why don’t we build a trading platform which makes it super easy to get your hands on bitcoin and If they want to spend it on different merchants and make all those different points easier, and that’s the idea behind Unocoin.
4.What was the initial response you got towards bitcoin in India ?
Initially when we launched Unocoin, to be honest, we were not expecting too much of a response because we were used to try different things. You know often time when you try new things, it doesn’t work right. So all of us just kept trying new things until something did work. And so when we launched Unocoin believe it or not, we were surprised because you know lots of people started coming to our site within the first few weeks and that was very exciting. Also, when it comes to response towards bitcoin in india I say comparatively for last 3.5 years ago, where we are today unocoin has 200000+ users. We transact around 4-5 million USD worth in bitcoins every single month. We have around 50 employees and we are growing between 25-30% every month. So today we find that India has started to really adopt bitcoin.it’s not as enhanced as much as US or China yet. I still feel like Indian market is few years behind those markets. At the same time India is definitely starting to appreciate and understand bitcoin. These is an example, our website Unocoin, we get about 15 thousand visitors a day.
There’s been a huge increase in the number of people visiting our site over the past year.
5.What is the impact of demonetization on bitcoins in India?
Before the demonetization our website was getting maybe 3-4 thousand sessions a day, today we are getting 15 thousand sessions a day. In 3-4 months it’s gone up almost 3 times a day with respect to volume. So i think, the impact in terms of volume has gone up. Now it’s hard to see whether all those impacts are because of demonetization or this is because of bitcoin price gone up a lot.
Conclusion
Anyone in india interested in buying and selling bitcoins, can go to www.unocoin.com. About 6 months ago, we closed financing with investors like Blume Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Bank to the Future, Bitcoin Capital, FundersClub, Mumbai Angels and ah! Ventures. We raised 2 million and now we are investing that into the company and scaling up operation. We are also hiring people who are interested in joining a bitcoin company, they can send they can send their resume to jobs@unocoin.com.
