Bitcoin and millennials: How Indian crypto entrepreneurs beat the system

With the speed cryptocurrency is emerging as the Millennial generation’s alternative asset of choice in India, it’s hard to imagine that just two years ago a couple of blockchain pioneers were briefly in police custody.

Sathvik Vishwanath and Harish BV, cofounders of a then five-year-old startup, were arrested in late 2018. No, they hadn’t pulled off a shady initial coin offering. Their “crime” was that they put up a kiosk in a mall in Bangalore where customers could swap Bitcoin, Ether or Ripple for cash or vice versa. That was the whole point of Unocoin, their crypto token exchange. But the police were suspicious of the new-fangled “ATM”

A lot has changed since then. Unocoin, which just raised financing from Tesla Inc.-backer Tim Draper’s Draper Associates, is flourishing, together with other Indian blockchain ventures.