These engineers built bootstrapped crypto startup BuyUCoin while still in college — today, the exchange has 1M+ users who trade Bitcoin and other coins
Engineering batchmates Shivam Thakral, Devesh Aggrawal, and Atulya B started to build a cryptocurrency exchange while still in college and launched crypto startup BuyUCoin in 2016. Since then, the exchange has seen over one million users and transactions worth $800 million.
When crypto startup Co-founder Shivam Thakral was still a student at Harcourt Butler Technical University in Kanpur back in 2015, he would often take up freelance website development assignments from overseas clients. One day, that same year, a client asked him if he accepted payment in Bitcoin.
Unaware what that meant at the time, Shivam looked it up and realised he could accept Bitcoin from the client and liquidate it to receive INR in his Indian bank account. He agreed to accept his payment in Bitcoin, and soon enough, Shivam received the payment in under six hours — much faster than the five-to-seven day time period taken for overseas payment transactions in fiat currency.
The engineer also realised that there weren’t many Indian companies working actively in the crypto space.
This inspired him to start and build bootstrapped crypto startup BuyUCoin —India’s first multi-cryptocurrency exchange, based in Delhi-NCR, where merchants and consumers can easily transact in — buy, sell and trade — or store Bitcoin, and several altcoins such as Ethereum, Ripple, and others.