Founders of Web 3 Podcast Series -What’s going on in Indian Crypto Scene? Nischal Shetty of WazirX

Founders of Web 3 is a podcast series hosted by Outlier Ventures Founder & CEO Jamie Burke where he introduces you to the entrepreneurs, their investors and the policy makers that are shaping Web 3.

Nischal Shetty the Founder of WazirX, India’s largest crypto exchange, talks about its challenges operating in a restricted business environment, and his role in lobbying and succeeding regulatory change. He also shares about his journey as a serial web entrepreneur, what’s different running a Web 3 startup and his multi million dollar partnership and venture fund with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to make India a leading crypto nation.

Listen to Nischal’s podcast on Apple podcast

Jamie: Welcome to the Founders of Web 3 series by Outlier Ventures and me your host Jamie Burke. Together we’re going to meet the entrepreneurs the backers and the leading policymakers that are shaping Web 3. Together we’re going to try to define what is Web 3, explore its nuances and understand the mission and purpose the drive founders. If you enjoy what you hear, please do subscribe, rate and share your feedback to help us reach as many people as possible with the important mission that is Web 3.

Welcome to our Founders of Web 3 podcast today we’ve got Nischal Shetty of with WazirX and hopefully I pronounced that right. It’s a great privilege to to talk to you and hopefully gain your perspective, both as an entrepreneur generally and then specifically navigating the world of crypto in India. So thanks for joining me.

Nischal: Glad to be here. And thanks a lot for having me on the podcast.

Jamie: So what I want to do is to kind of start with your journey as an entrepreneur, as the title suggests, founders of Web 3 is really trying to meet the people that are driving that movement forward. And clearly, you are one of the leaders, emerging leaders globally but also with India, which is a huge market with huge potential. I think we’ve all been kind of waiting on the sidelines to see what happens. And obviously there’s been some really interesting developments there. Which I can see you’re taking advantage of, but first, it’d be good to understand your background a little bit as an entrepreneur as I understand it. You are a serial entrepreneur, you are Forbes 30 under 30. I’m always very jealous of I only get invited to judge these things nowadays. Sadly, there’s not something that’s going to reflect my age. And prior view was there x, which was founded a couple of years ago, you set up a number of different startups kind of focused on social media and web two, as I understand it, just unfollow, and crowdfire. So you be good to understand that journey and how you ended up where you are today?

Nischal: Sure, it’s, it’s been about 13 years since I’ve been, you know, either working in a company or going running my own startup. The first few years of my career started as a software developer. And I joined a regular corporate job for about two years, till I realised that that was not for me. It was too slow. I realised and the tech wasn’t really, you know, I would say, new. I always wanted to try new stuff. So I moved over to a startup in India, that was very similar to have the yelpers. Like a restaurant review status. Yeah. And that, you know, really gave me the insights and understanding of how startups function, how they really are rapid in terms of going to market and development and everything. And that stage was, what stage a startup was that when he joined, so they had just gotten acquired, but, and they were like, the most popular in India when I was joining. But they got acquired pretty early. So it was a small team of about, I think, 2025 people, when I joined, and I joined them just a month after the acquisition. Alright, so I got to work closely with the founders and the founding team. That’s where my learning began. And soon after, since I understood that you could build products I I ended up building, just unfollow, which was on top of the Twitter API. This was the early days of Twitter, you know? 2000 intent when Twitter had just launched their API, and I thought I should build something just to scratch that itch I launched, just unfollow. And it surprisingly, went viral. And the main reason was because Michael Arrington happened to be one of those people who tried it. And he, and he wrote about it on TechCrunch. And back then if you if you got your product on TechCrunch, that was it. You know, people went crazy about using the products after that. And it started growing organically. And it reached a point about, I think, eight months into my job where it was paying me more than my, my job was paying me significantly more, you know, like, I was making more money in a month than I was making a year in my job. So So what do you do when that happens? You quit. And that’s what I did. So I would say I’m an accidental entrepreneur just got into it because I was pushed into it by my users. And after I quit my job, I To meet another friend of mine, who’s my co founder quit, and he joined me. And then we started scaling the company, and Samir or staff, that was me. And so he was the one who joined me first. And then a few months down the line, we realised that the name just unfollow was more, I would say, constrained in terms of what we did. And that’s why we rebranded to crowdfire. So just unfollow became crowdfire. And we started building this into a social media management app. And then we raised about just before we reach I think, so that my third co founder joined us. We were still a small team of about five people back then, when he was joining us. And he had a different setup. So we were all friends. We all knew each other. And we were like, how do we all get together and build something bigger rather than, you know, working in silos, on our own products. So that’s how us three co founders got together. And then we raise money for this. For this product. It grew we grew to about 10 million users, but During that time, on in parallel, I was looking into cryptocurrencies understanding decentralisation. And that was a really fascinating world for me. Because I was here I was building on top of all these centralised API’s. And there I could see all these decentralised ones where you don’t need permission. So so that’s how I eventually ended up building a zero. And my simple condors joined us craps are still going today or yeah, it is. It has a separate team. We we moved out of it when we were starting with Xerox. So there’s a separate team that’s running Kafka. It’s a good SAS business, I would say, which is growing healthy year on year.

Jamie: Interesting. So I mean, I’m also slightly envious of the idea of having your three Co-Founders to kind of share that that burden with especially if you start out of friends and but obviously, that has some challenges as well. I mean, what are the pros and cons of three friends, being co founders, I think should start with the content in the corners. If, yeah, if something goes wrong, you know, your friends, you guys have to, I would say, have certain level of understanding that, you know, you might fuck up things and that’s fine. But how do you tell each other? It’s never easy. I mean, if you have a strictly professional relationship, it’s really easy to point out, you know, hey, this is not how this has to be done or, you know, this is not right. So I think one of the problems we’ve found is how do you communicate that effectively without it affecting your friendship or your personal relationships with each other. But I think, having worked we now have both, or I think eight or nine years together so you eventually learn how to deal with it. Our rule was simple that what happens in our book meeting, he forget it the moment of each meeting his time as in how we all spoke to each other, how we all pointed out our flaws. We forget about that after the meeting is done and work towards making ourselves better. So I think that’s working out well for us right now. You’ve got a you’ve got better friends than me.

Nischal: So the pros, I think the pros are, again, I think the same thing is a pro that you are friends. So you can completely trust each other to not worry about each doing their own jobs, like I can just focus on my work, not worrying about what my co founders are going to do, because I believe, and trust that they’re going to do their part of the bargain, you know, like, whatever jobs are divided, you all do it without having to worry about each other. So that sort of breaks down your efforts, and your true team that you don’t have to take all the burden on your head alone. So that’s been really, I would say, the biggest pro of working with co founders and friends. So yeah, I think I’m a big believer that alone, you’re just going to achieve maybe x with, you know, two or three more people as co founders, you’re going to do much better.

Jamie: Yeah, and I guess if you have, you know, that intimate understanding of one another, it’s easier to work around one another’s weaknesses and strengths. So You can perhaps have a more honest, dynamic, and perhaps you have the comfort to be more honest about your own weaknesses, where, you know, if you’re, if you’re building a company with people that start out as strangers where the relationship might be a bit more strictly professional, you know that there is always this, this tendency for a lot of founders to, to, to try to mask over weaknesses, failings to try to take on everything.

Nischal: Absolutely. And, you know, when you have friends, you cannot ask them to work more than you should.

Jamie: So, you said you were an accidental entrepreneur with in the first instance, what came to evolve into crowdfire. But clearly when you moved into, you know, this next venture was air x. Presumably This was intentional. What was the difference between being an accidental entrepreneur and being pulled out of, you know, job security and stuff. A project intentionally and kind of when did was air x shift from, presumably something that you managed to convince your co founders to experiment with on the side? And perhaps could have been perceived as a distraction to the main thing? I mean, I’m assuming it’s the main thing.

Nischal: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the biggest difference I’ve seen between being accidental versus planning it out on a lighter note, it is a name. You know, when I started my first product, I just named whatever, just because I wanted to launch it. And then I had to rebrand it. While I was in racks, we really thought hard on what the branding should be what the name should be such that in India, it becomes a recognised brand. And now when I look back, we’ve done a pretty good job of branding it as an Indian exchange. The other thing is, you also have sort of a plan when you you know, intentionally launch something. And if things fall into place, you realise your speed when you plan and then execute is far greater than when you’re acting accidently getting into it where you do not really have a long term plan or vision of what and how you’re going to build it. I think the speed matters. So if you start something well planned and intentionally, and if things fall in place, your growth will be much more rapid. At least that’s what I’ve seen in my new venture the baby grown with fuzzy RX in India, you know, that was all planning and then the execution rather than execute and then figure out why you did what Okay, so how do you navigate I mean, I’ve been in, let’s just say that the blockchain space generally for over six years now I guess, and both as an entrepreneur myself, but of course, much more focused on backing other entrepreneurs as an investor, you being an entrepreneur generally is is really difficult. It’s really challenging. There’s so much uncertainty and unknowns. But you know, when you add in the complication of crypto and Web 3 generally because it’s Such an emergent space.

Jamie: But within that, you know, specifically crypto and digital assets and all the regulatory uncertainty that goes with that. How do you how do you plan in that? So, you know, you said you kind of have a much more stronger direction, presumably around the product, but how do you plan in such a complex and dynamic space?

Nischal: If you would talk about regulatory, I would say, honestly, you just count. If you look at what happened to us, we launched and within about three weeks, the central bank in India, came up with a banking restriction or a banking ban it as as many columns where we were not allowed to have a bank account. So you cannot really plan for regulatory challenges. But the good thing is in crypto, you do know there will be regulatory challenges. So what you can do is assume what are the worst that can happen in terms of regulations, and probably be ready for it. That’s what we did. We knew that there were no regulations in India. It might happen, our worst case was there would be a complete ban. And then you have to, you know, just wrap it up or maybe move to a different country and launch it there. That was the idea that we discuss amongst ourselves. And that was a definite, you know, I think a threat to any business in this space in India, at least. So we we had that in mind. And then we launched we, to be honest, we never anticipated it to be an in between stage where the regulations are killing your business, but the banking ban is affecting it such that you your business can die. And we saw that happening to other exchanges in India. But when we launched we had this focus that we will build the best product and we will do whatever it takes to ensure that Indians are able to be involved in the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. So when you have that mission in your mind that you want to onboard all the Indians into this new technology into this new space. You do whatever it takes, so till it was not illegal, we knew We will keep trying. So when this banking ban happened, we kept trying, you know, we said, What do you do when you don’t have a bank account, you do peer to peer. And that’s what we did. So it was not like a big worry. For us. It was, in fact, a challenge that and as for guys who love building products, I think we enjoyed that whole situation on how do you innovate in this situation, it was a great challenge for us. So we will not be motivated. We were like, you know, how do you solve this? We just have to solve it. That was it. And I think that helped dinners. Because while the other exchanges were shutting down, we were growing. So the banking man helped us a lot, I think, and now it’s gone. So it’s even better. We are growing even faster now.

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. You know, I’ve seen lots of different approaches taken by startups based upon a couple of things actually, normally the risk profile of the founders, but also the risk profile of their shareholders. And so even if you have entrepreneurs that are happy, personally happy to innovate at the very edge and operate within a degree of uncertainty. And of course, in some instances, you know, that has been communicated that it’s potentially a criminal issue rather than necessarily something. It’s a dangerous to the individuals rather than the commercial entity. So, I mean, I’m assuming that you had either no shareholders and you boost bootstrap this yourself or you had shareholders that bought into the vision or or shared your risk profile, which was it.

Nischal: So in our case, for was x, we did not have to worry about shareholders, though I do have shareholders in my first company. But I would say the even if there were shareholders, as entrepreneurs, I think it’s our responsibility to ensure that we clearly tell the shareholders about what you’re getting into. But if you scare them too much, you know they’re not going to be by your side all the time. So I believe person you give them enough information. To ensure that they understand the risks, but not go too deep. Well, like if you’re going to go to one official and say, hey, look, it might get banned in India tomorrow. And we might want to have to shut down. And I think that’s great. But if you say, but there might be a possibility, there would be criminal charges that the government might press against companies in this space. I think that’s just unwanted you’re being developed. Because you know, that you’re not in a truly illegal space, you’re building something that right now legal in the country, or at least in the grey area, and it’s not something that you’re illegally, you know, doing anything right now, or you’re, you know, being fraudulent. Yeah, you’re not being so, you know, you’re a good actor, you know, you’re an actor, I guess, is that confidence in that, right? So I would say you have to worry like, say if you your idea was to have a frivolous Ico and maybe make some money and then figure out what to do with that money or whatever versus, you know, you Building a product, you are going to deliver something good to the audiences, you’re going to help the country in that whole technology. It is this is my mindset I’m talking about where when I was building, this was what was going on. I was not getting in there to be rich overnight. I was not getting in there to, you know, just dip my hand into something that is amazing. Everyone’s going in and getting rich. Let’s go in. It was more about tech, it was more about India, participation in this tech, you know, not enough companies in the blockchain space. That is what I was looking at in India back then, even now, not enough people in the blockchain space here. How do you be one of those early movers in this case? So when that happens, your conscience is clear. I don’t think you have to worry too much, you know, in terms of your shareholders, you know, they get it afterwards. So I mean, I definitely want to go into that that mission, because clearly, you know, you do have a very clear mission around what I’m assuming is inclusion, but but just before I go into that, what about the other shareholder group? So the other important shareholder group family. I don’t know if you have children, but I assume, you know, families is very important to you. How did they How did they respond to you innovating at the edge of this grey space in crypto? I think, for me, my family’s always been supportive. They were in fact, more worried in the first time I was doing this. And you know, after a while, you just assumed this is the new normal. So me wanting to build something new or trying something new in the even in my previous company, we tried a couple of products and it’s not well, we failed. So these things happen all the time. And for them now, this is a new normal, they will be surprised if I don’t do something. So I think the first time they were all worried when I was quitting my job for the first time, and that’s why I said I quit my job only when I was making more money than my job. So that was like, you know, still a comfort zone for everyone around me, I guess. So they were more worried about the the job stability than necessarily that you were working in crypto.

Jamie: All right. Sounds like you’ve got good friends and family. So you’re you’re definitely winning in life. So let’s go into the mission a bit because clearly you have been, presumably one of the ones that has been pushing and advocating for a more either relaxed or positive attitude towards crypto in India. Why is that? What is what is it that motivates you feel good. When I look at decentralisation, I see that this is one of those innovations in tech, which probably is world changing initiative. I look at the last few decades, I look at computers changing the world, then you look at Internet has changed the world, your mobile phones have changed. This seems to be one of those events, which is a creation of a decent life for so that’s one part from a tech point of view. It excites me a lot that I’m at the beginning stage, I would still say we’re at the initial stages off the decent ization of the internet. Andwhy is that important just to kind of press upon that because I know, we always, as an industry always talk about decentralisation a lot. And I think a lot of people still struggle with, you know why that’s important versus a friction point.

Nischal: If you were to ask me, I’m just tired of, you know, asking permission to use a build on top of products. That’s been my biggest tip is, yeah, the API. I’m right. I’m just tired, not just personally, but I’ve seen 10s and hundreds of products being killed by the platforms on top of whom they were built. This I’ve seen this happen time and again, you name a platform, I will tell you at least five to 10 good products that were killed by those platforms, because either they thought those platforms or these products are not good, or they wanted to make money so they had to kill these third party products. And I don’t believe this is how they should you know what the internet was not supposed to be where there were some monopolies which would allow you to build wealth. They want it and kill you when they want. I don’t think that should ever be possible on the internet.

Jamie: Now that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting point because I was going to mention earlier, when you said that the unjust unfollow was based upon a Twitter API. So actually, my journey into this space, it’s not too dissimilar from yours. I set up the first European kind of social media consultancy way back, I was one of the first people to bring Facebook and Twitter into a number of ad agencies in Europe. And so I saw a lot of innovation happen around the edges of these platforms, and yeah, right, revote API’s, whenever one of them became remotely successful. So that’s really interesting perspective as a developer, you know, you look at your rights and access to, I guess, users data API’s. It’s that form of centralization that motivates you to to kind of remove these These monopolies?

Nishal: Absolutely. I mean, you know, at the core, I’m a developer. And when I look at the Internet, I think it would have been much more better if people had no fear of building what they wanted. But there exists a fear today. And I think in the decent light world, that fear goes off. And that excites me about what are the possibilities when this happens? You know, it’s just that I think we’re still not there yet. Because we’re still in the infrastructure building phase. There are tonnes of ideas that come to your mind, but you can’t build it because there’s not enough infrastructure possible for those ideas to emerge today. But there will be a time and all of these ideas will be able to, you know, execute on top of a decentralised ecosystem.

Jamie: So yeah, that’s what excites me the most is interesting because my my natural assumption and perhaps prejudices, prejudices would I would have expected you to say inclusion, financial inclusion, you know, including India and Indians in the ability to participate in in crypto as a as a financial asset, especially given, you know, your your background as an exchange, it’s, it’s interesting to hear that the primary personal motivating factor is is actually much bigger than that. It’s kind of generally around a decentralising the web.

Nischal: Okay, so the the inclusion part is the, yeah, that’s the second part that I was going to come to is where, let’s say this world becomes a reality that whole decentralised. So with its own set of decent life protocols and stuff, the early movers, who hold these assets would be the ones who would be benefiting the maximum. And if that reality has to happen, I believe that Indians should have the opportunity to be the early movers as well, to participate in this, you know, decent class hold by holding the assets that they want, which is what led me to build was index eventually, because I wanted to make sure that if anyone in India believes in this vision of a decentralised ecosystem, then all of these things protocols would have their own token. And if you believe in any protocol, probably, you know, invest in it. But how do you invest easily It was hard in India. So that’s where I built value.

Jamie: So recently you announced a joint fund with finance $50 million equivalent to invest in the Indian blockchain crypto ecosystem, backed by bnb, and your own token. And that came 10 days after that announcement anyway, came 10 days after the Bank of India removed a ban and relating to crypto. So it would be good to understand the kind of sequence of events there. Firstly, if you could explain for the listeners, what that that news was, what had changed what it made possible, and then really how that partnership came about, and then we’ll go into a little bit about the investment thesis and what you’re hoping to achieve. Sure.

Nischal: So to give a bit of a background This was in April 2018, when the Central Bank of India said exchanges and all the crypto businesses should not they will not get access to banking in India. And we immediately we as few of us exchanges as part of an organisation here, we put a case against this order by the Central Bank of India to prove that we are legitimate businesses and we do need access to bank accounts. And in after a year and a half of fighting the case in the Supreme Court on the fourth Of March 2020 is when we won this case. And that was a moment of occasion for India because now, all of us in the crypto space, we can all have bank accounts as soon as this happened to answer your question about the fund. So we always wanted to have a fund for India. But the biggest limiting factor was the fact that if you start a business in the crypto space in India, anything you want, well, you cannot have bank accounts, and it made no sense to start new businesses in the crypto space In India during this period, which is why you wouldn’t see any startups emerging in India during this banking ban. And now that the bank King ban was lifted, we knew that there would be entrepreneurs who would want to build for the crypto and blockchain ecosystem. But how do you help bootstrap that sooner than later because, you know, the typical investment while it takes time for them to understand the ecosystem, and then probably your mark some funds from there invest for their investments and all in this space, but we want to do it faster. And binance really moves fast, to be honest. So when I it was not even me, a couple of people within finance, who said, Hey, why don’t you, you know, start a fund to bootstrap the ecosystem. We’ll put in half you put in half. I was like, Fine, let’s do it. And I thought it might take time but the next day, they were like, we’re all ready with the documents and stuff and let’s do this. So I said, Oh, They will do it. And so it was, I think, the fastest time, within 2448 hours, they were ready with everything. And probably partly because they already have this bnb fund for startups around the world. So it’s more like I think it’s templatized right now on how do you quickly launch a fund for a country? So yeah, we did that. And I think it’s a good move. Because as entrepreneurs, when you want to build, you just don’t need money, only money, you can still find it. You also need expertise. And you need people who understand you know, you don’t want to go to a presentation to VCs and first have to tell them why decentralisation, what is crypto, what is blockchain, you will never even start your slide for about your productive. So I think if you’re building early, I think people who understand this ecosystem raising from them is better. Which is why I think our fund helps in that aspect. quickly we can understand your business and we can also help you in whatever we want. So Yeah, it’s just to help bootstrap the Indian blockchain and crypto ecosystem.

Jamie: Yeah. And I’m not surprised that the speed of things were quite close to by Nance. And they definitely move very quickly. And actually, I can see some parallels between Cz and you. And certainly in how you interact with your community. On Twitter, you’re very responsive. And you’re technically solving problems for them real time. So with the funds, there kind of thesis makes sense. You’re kind of focused on on off ramps, wallets, so kind of the infrastructure that’s going to enable things primarily from an exchange perspective. And then naturally, you’re looking at use cases and defy including stable coins. You do, say apps that daps as well. But I’m presuming that initially still going to be much more focused around financial services.

Nischal: yeah, I think, right now, we need to enable the whole infrastructure development like you rightly said, whatever is needed. Eventually I think more we will see more of daps in different aspects. But right now, I think we’re more interested in all the infrastructure development around the whole decentralised world, so anyone’s got any idea, I would love to see some protocols coming out of Indiana. I think we’re all open for investments in any of these aspects. Well, we should definitely talk offline about how we can collaborate on you know, acceleration in India or of Indian startups, as you say, you know, capital is is just one element of it. I think clearly having entrepreneurs as investors is going to be really helpful, especially somebody like yourself, who’s navigated the complexities of that landscape at all levels. So you’re deploying into both equity and tokens 100 k USD, up to 5 million tickets, presumably, the latter will come later on as you’re kind of fighting going on. And as the ecosystem matures, you’re also looking to support students set up incubators to develop talent. I mean, clearly, India has always had very strong development talent. And certainly in the context of things like mathematics and stem, and solving very complex technical problems, I can imagine there should be huge growth in things like token engineering, but what is it from my personal experience of engaging and trying to engage with the startup ecosystem, the crypto startup ecosystem in, in India over the last several years? It’s not, it’s never felt that big. It’s never felt like it was top of mind to most developers, especially those working in in universities. Is that true? Is that changing? You know, what’s your perspective on the level of even awareness of Web 3 and Web 3 technologies I think what do you say, would have been true A few years ago, but a lot has changed in the last couple of years, you know, because I think the 2017 bull run really brought in a lot of awareness about crypto, and then the Curiosity on what it is on the part of a lot of developers here to understand the underlying technology. So even though they were not really about the asset, so much about the price and all, but when they started seeing the word, you know, Bitcoin everywhere, on all the press and stuff, the Curiosity caught them into blockchain. So when I look at it today, a lot of developers want to be involved in blockchain development in some form or the other and they’re looking to learn and, you know, start something, but like I said, The unfortunate thing is, in the last two years, we also had banking ban. And you do not want to be an entrepreneur who’s going to start a business in an environment where you can’t even have a bank account. How do you even know pay salaries for people. How do we even do anything less? There were no VCs investing. So you don’t have capital asset. So I am not surprised that though there is enthusiasm, there aren’t enough, I would say startups in India in the space yet. But the next two years if we can, you know, I’m pretty sure we can turn this around, so that we will have at least 100 to 500 startups in India in the blockchain and crypto space. That’s my view.

Jamie: That’s, it’s, I mean, there’s just clearly huge potential there. And as you say, Now, some of these roadblocks have been removed from an administrative perspective. And now there are, you know, successful entrepreneurs like you as role models, and now kind of recycling that wealth and feeding it into the ecosystem. I think it’s a really exciting moment. And I speak to startups from from all over the world. And for example, I spent a lot of time the beginning parts of last year, in in the Balkans and the Baltics, in Qatar. of Eastern Southeastern Europe. And it was quite interesting that they suffered from a lot of scams during the Ico mania, of course, one coin probably being the most well known. And actually it had left it crypto become a really dirty word to any serious entrepreneur or developer. They just didn’t want to be associated to it, even if they, you know, they felt there was potential in the underlying technology. It was just it was very stigmatised it how how is India and the kind of association of crypto affected during that whole period?

Nischal: It’s very similar. So there was a large scam that happened in India in 2017. I think where a lot of people lost money because they invested in a token they thought it was Bitcoin, but it wasn’t. So I think there’s also this this bit Connect scam. I think a lot of Indians had invested in Bitcoin. as well, so they lost their money there too. But, you know, I see that as a problem. It’s the journey. It happened in the internet while I was a victim of a scam online in my early days in, you know, when I was first new to the internet, back when internet was still in, you had to go to these cyber cafes and get access for 30 minutes, you could browse, I ended up ordering stuff online, paid it and I never got that stuff. And I thought ecommerce was can online, and it will never work. So that’s the stage we were in right now here. Where are people thought of investing in kryptos. And their investments just vanished overnight. And that’s what we need to change. And that’s why what you said previously, you had said that similar to Cz, being active on Twitter, I am also active. The reason being that we all have to see I think there’s only one Satoshi Nakamoto who can be anonymous, and we can all say that he has done a great job, but I think every other founder needs be as open as possible to bring in the trust because we deal with people’s money eventually, or people have their money riding on the stuff that we are going to build. So we need to make sure that we are very open and communicative with our audiences so that they know who we are, who are the people and unless you do not know that I wouldn’t suggest you putting your money into anything you should be clear about who’s building the bank.

Jamie: That’s really interesting. So, you know, you feel that more than any other industry. As a founder. It’s very important that you have unusually high degrees of visibility, openness, transparency, and kind of participation in the wider community. Because of the kind of the the shadow or the overhang of a general attitude towards crypto, you think that’s a greater obligation or requirement to kind of be in be in the limelight?

Nischal: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, Read a news website. And I don’t know who the founder is, it’s fine. What’s the worst they can do? Give me fake news. And you know, nothing more than that. But if I’m going to put my money into a product where I rely on that for the future, and that founder is not known, they can run away and probably ruin me financial. So I would say the degree of transparency that is needed in this ecosystem is much, much more than any other ecosystem until today. And founders who understand and, you know, figure that out. I think they’re the ones who are going to succeed, and they’re already succeeding. It’s just about being very open about what you’re building, how you’re building who you are, who your team is, where you are, I think that’s very, very important. And the first phase took advantage of this very fact of anonymity. And that’s where all the scams happen. So I think that is changing now. And all of us have to together change it by being as transparent as possible.

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, it’s ironic given that, you know, many people talk about the spaces enabling trust. lab where we talk about trustless technology, but there’s still the important role of the person in the individual and actually, large Lundy, who’s our head of research at sha Allah says, in an increasingly decentralised world, one of the only moats becomes you know your brand, and the trust that people have in the in the team behind behind the product. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the luck in helping continue to grow the Indian ecosystem. And it’s great that they have you as a role model and hero. I’m looking forward to watching your success continue. And I’m probably going to try and have you on at some point again, I definitely want to connect you to Joel john, who’s one of our leading analysts who’s based out of India after this as well.

Nischal: Sounds good. And thanks a lot for having me. Pleasure talk to you.

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