How Vyanjan Became The First Crypto Food Joint in Kolkata
Happiness is… To be able to buy your daily bread from your favorite next door food joint with Nano!
In the northern part of Kolkata at Lake Town, there lies an amazing new food joint that now accepts the $XNO(Nano) #cryptocurrency as payment.
Since its inception in June, the experience at Vyanjan has been absolutely fantastic! This new food joint has been extremely community friendly and always listens very patiently to customer feedback. Run by Mr. Aniruddh Binnany, an extremely humble gentleman, Vyanjan is working very passionately on this new venture. Working hard every day, it is incredible to see someone so enthusiastic about the concept of a foodie.
The founder of Vyanjan is always experimenting and creating surprisingly new delicacies in very simple but interesting ways. Starting from Garlic Bread, Oreo Shake, Potato Twister, Vada Pav, Pav Bhaji, and so much more… The list just seems to grow every day!
Inspired by his efforts, and a too thoughtful descientist as I am 😅, I started to think about this idea whenever I would be free at my lab. Exploring various options on how to expand his reach towards customers, I made a list of 10 suggestions that would help him in spreading the word further:
1. Inclusion of exclusive and authentic Bikaneri cuisines.
2. Local promotion (banner placements) within 1 km radius (especially at both ends of the road), to highlight availability of day to day grocery items (for example, Milk packets) and special items (for example, Oreo Shake). This will greatly increase noticeability.
3. Free promotion on local online business listings such as Quikr, Olx, Justdial, Indiamart, Facebook, Twitter…
4. Include cheaper alternatives to Zomato and Swiggy for take away delivery options (for example, Blinkit)
5. Create a free Google Business Page for easy accessibility through Google Maps. For example, if this is enabled, online searches on Google such as “milk shake stores near me” could significantly increase the chances to reveal Vyanjan in the search results.
6. Increase variety of grocery items.
7. Include Puri style Kachori also.
8. Identify the items selling most and increase its quantity and variety.
9. Join foodie groups on Facebook and let people know about Vyanjan’s specialty items with videos and pictures.
10. Create an YouTube account to promote the store. Make videos on the preparation of exclusive special items. Monetize those videos later for passive funding.
Gladly, many of them worked out, and I always wish his foodie network keeps growing and growing.
As is the goal of #DeSci, we researchers should directly be able to benefit society.
Likewise & shortly after, the thought of crypto backed food started occurring to me. When I looked up a bit about the current scenario in India, I found out that Delhi and Bengaluru already have some pretty vast use cases where some restaurants accept crypto.
Soon, I started researching on various cryptocurrencies in order to find one that would best suit this use case. When I first considered Bitcoin through the Lightning Network, it didn’t seem to be very suitable. To be an actually feasible payment processor for this use case, considering day to day purchases at Vyanjan, one should be able to buy even a cup of tea worth ₹6 with cryptocurrency at zero fees. Bitcoin or any other major cryptocurrency didn’t seem to fit-in due to the comparatively huge transaction fees involved.
Next, I started considering fiat backed and regulated stablecoins such as Binance USD using the Binance Smart Chain network (BEP-20). In this case too, there was a similar issue with high fees, even for purchasing low cost items starting at ₹6.
This is when I realized that I should be making a choice between Stellar Lumens(XLM) and Nano(XNO).
Both cryptos, of course, have a fantastic community following, especially on Reddit, and the knowledge in there is amazing!
Eventually, I came to the understanding that both seem to have almost equally significant use cases. I also found out that, Stellar Lumens has yet to reach its full market supply, with 25,153,341,606 XLM coins currently in circulation, and yet to reach a maximum supply of 50,001,806,812 XLM coins. On the other hand, Nano has already reached its full supply, with a maximum of 133,248,297 XNO in circulation.
This felt interesting…more specifically, this particular quote from Coin Market Cap:
Nano is unusual in the fact that its entire supply is already in circulation, this means it is fully diluted.
Because it is fully diluted, nano is also highly decentralized, and well distributed, with the vast majority of nano accounts holding less than Ӿ100. As of December 2020, around 20% of all nano in circulation (~26 million) is held in one of the cold wallets associated with the Binance cryptocurrency exchange.
That was it! It reminded me of why someone mentioned on Reddit that Nano is eventually going to stabilize at a global scale. As of now, it seems to be synchronizing with USD 🤔…
Thereafter, after sharing my research at Vyanjan, it was decided that Nano seems to be the ideal choice!
Coincidentally, my first crypto purchase here, began with a server failure with UPI at my local bank today (3rd August 2022).
As goes the saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”, Nano definitely came to the rescue!
I was instantly able to buy a pack of bread slices in less than a second! Later on during the day, I also had some Rose Cola and Maggie noodles with Nano! Satisfying one’s hungry stomach with this feeless cryptocurrency is perhaps the most “down-to-earth” utility for blockchains ;) !
So, we can now happily conclude that Vyanjan is the first food joint in Kolkata to accept crypto! At the same time, perhaps we can also say it’s the first food joint in India where you can effortlessly enjoy a lovely cup of tea with Nano! But even if you don’t happen to be a crypto enthusiast, you should absolutely make a visit to explore their delicacies!
