The Art of A Good Unicorn | Curating a product market fit for your crypto startup

Being a crypto entrepreneur in India could have Herculean challenges, because, from a regulatory perspective, it’s a rocky relationship with crypto without much legitimacy. And if someone puts their hard-earned salary into crypto and something goes wrong, they may not be able to knock on the doors of regulators either, because policymakers may see cryptocurrency akin to gambling.

In an interview, Vikram Subburaj, CEO & co-founder of Giottus, a crypto assets trading portal, answered a range of questions on crypto entrepreneurship in India. 

So, what does the crypto landscape look like for entrepreneurs in India?

Crypto is a parallel technology, like the Internet, where more than one industry is redefined and transformed and where even new industries get created. It’s, also, a horizontal technology that is able to create a network in a decentralised manner. Traditionally, the benefits and value of a network lie only with the entity or corporate that creates it and that’s where cryptocurrency comes in to spread that value across to everyone. Think of those old dial-up connections where the network was really slow, but it could still do certain things; the promise of what it could do was what ought to be kept in mind. We’re at that stage right now where there is a limitation of transactions per second, but it’s being solved.

But, what could that mean from the consumer perspective?

One may not want a centralised corporate entity to dictate the terms of digital media that people are using. People should have a say in defining the rules of technology, which proves the need for a decentralized system… Say there are people investing or having ownership of a particular cryptocurrency project. They have a say on what the rules of the project should be, how the network should work, what the punishment could be, like a deduction of a certain percentage or being banned from the network and more.

So, they’re defining the rules by having ownership in the network. And if this network grows really big, it becomes like a decentralized nation with people sitting around different parts of the world. But, imagine that on a smaller scale, where rules, habits and characteristics get defined and a culture gets formed if the network survives.

But, what could the use cases of cryptocurrency tangibly look like?

The use cases of cryptocurrency are already seen as being better than existing systems, such as payments in the remittance market. One area or challenge where adoption hasn’t grown drastically yet is because of regulations. So, there are industries, where regulation is the hurdle, not the product. And the amount of monetary gain that this is going to give people who would adopt it is much higher than that of existing systems and processes…

Parallelly, when there’s no headache from a regulatory perspective and where adoption would be more cemented is the gaming industry, which has an imminent need in the form of NFTs, which are going to be really big in that sector. 10 years from now, I foresee most of the infrastructure behind one’s payments and remittance markets being handled through cryptocurrency networks.

And how does one curate a product-market fit in the crypto realm?

Out of the 8-10 players out there, we’re the only ones bootstrapped and we’re said to be in the top 4 based on volumes. And we didn’t spend money to acquire customers, it was just our product and the referral programme we had, which has led to a customer base of about 1 million to 1.5 million…

At one point, an RBI circular restricted crypto entities from having a banking exchange. At that point, there were about 50 exchanges and that came down to about 10, which made our job much clearer. And then, a Supreme Court verdict lifted this ban a couple of years later… We, also, created models through which customers could buy and sell cryptos in India and we were the first in the market to launch these models. That’s how we got our initial customer base. If we build really good tech, our competition could, also, build it within the next couple of months, so that’s not going to be a differentiator, so we had to build something that people feel like they’re being taken care of.

So, what can be said of the regulatory hurdles for crypto entrepreneurs in India?

From a regulatory perspective for India, what’s actually needed is the tax pain… There are certain laws or regulations that have the potential to kill the industry outright or create a scenario wherein the industry moves out of India with foreign entities actually being incentivised. So, there shouldn’t be a disparity created because of taxation. We see something like this even in an interstate form, where one state has a higher tax than the other, leading to a lot of illegal goods flowing from one state to the other.

As crypto entities, we want to make sure that we’re part of the engine trying to do good for the nation, rather than having us be kept aside or blamed for issues.

Shrija Agrawal is a business journalist. The views expressed are personal