Inside Bitbns, one of India’s largest crypto exchanges

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have gaurav dahaki the ceo of bitbns welcome to the show garof it's a pleasure to have you here today same year thanks a lot for having me over ashton i'm really excited for our discussion today if you could just kick it off with

0:20briefly explain how you got into bitcoin and blockchain and how that led to you starting the bitbns exchange right so my first brush with bitcoin happened uh back in the final year of my college so this was 2012 and uh we at that point in time bitcoin price started rising and we started kind of learning more about the technology uh we being engineers we figured out

0:47that we probably should kind of try mining it on a computer and none of us had a sophisticated computer so we pulled in money and we kind of procured parts from amazon in the us got them to india assembled the pc and started mining uh and we did mine a few satoshis but then the difficulty bomb kind of kicked and then the difficulty became much higher and it

1:10was not mining so we started playing fifa on that computer but uh that was that brush then we kind of started working um after college and the second brush kind of came in 2017 when everything was kind of uh going into bitcoin and crypto and that's when we decided uh we can kind of possibly do something here and when we saw that there was a lack of credible exchanges from india and there

1:35was a lot of issues in terms of onboarding users and all so we decided to kind of start across an exchange and um we started on christmas eve 2017 and since then have kind of continued the course and has been kind of pretty amazing journey very cool backstory gaurav and yeah i can imagine getting a few satoshi's and then coming back five years later and being like

1:58oh man we were so close to mining all the bitcoin but hey there's still so early in the industry and now with you starting the bitbns cryptocurrency exchange in india i they still have a second chance to get involved and make a difference in this industry so with that could you give just an overview of exactly how bitbns works what are your current team's goals right

2:23sure so uh we're currently uh one of the largest exchanges from india uh on a daily basis we're kind of trading about 20 million dollars with respect to fiat uh and crypto pairs uh predominantly a fiat exchange so people can on board yf and then trade any digital asset 100 plus assets are there which people can trade um we have margin trading with leverage

2:48so people can trade leverage on the platform we also have derivatives that has kind of come in so we also have options where people can trade options uh and not just that we've kind of built a pretty interesting stuff over time so uh what we've done is um we kind of understood that if we kind of classify users overall uh the investor class of users was missing

3:16uh from crypto it came in 2017 a lot of them burned their hands in icos and other things and then they kind of vanished for the last two years 18 19 uh early 2020 now when there is a lot of again we are kind of closing towards all time highs and all then uh some of the investor classes coming back and we built a very interesting tool for that uh it's called

3:39bit droplet uh so apart from the exchange side of it so the exchange is for traders where we kind of make uh sophisticated instruments like uh you know the spot trading is there then you have margin trading with leverage then you have options derivatives and other things we also have something called uh as bit droplet which is a straightforward bitcoin dca tool

3:59uh so we launched it last year we were one of the first ones globally to kind of launch a straightforward bitcoin sip tool uh sip systematic investment into bitcoin and what has happened over time is bitcoin it's very hard to time bitcoin uh because the price changes are very very crazy right so you go from a two hundred dollars to uh or twenty thousand dollar and from

4:23twenty thousand you get back to three thousand right uh and that's when we kind of figured out like how do we kind of give or explain people how should you kind of take exposure into bitcoin and that's when we figured out like a dollar cost averaging is the best way to kind of do it and we made a tool for that uh it's called bit droplet and a lot of users are actively kind of

4:44using that tool so if you kind of most exchanges globally are focused on this kind of uh the trading side of users we as a whole want to kind of grow that ecosystem and also want to ensure we bring in new set of users who do want to get into crypto but uh trading is not very native for them to kind of get an exposure definitely that's really interesting and

5:07some great statistics that you mentioned there about 20 million in volume being one of the largest largest exchanges having all the necessary financial tools for people to be able to trade but the bit droplet seems like and this was going to be my next question something unique and a competitive advantage for the exchange to have that dollar cost averaging or to

5:27have that that fiat uh on and off ramp where you can easily have reoccurring purchases or get more exposure to the asset in an exchange is it seems like a great competitive advantage now do you see that as one of your main competitive advantages and also is that translating to a synergistic growth between you know people using that platform and also people reoccurring purchases now

5:51using bitbns for trading right so there is definitely a a certain overlap but uh i would say bit droplet is more towards investing sort of users like there are two classes of users one is the active traders who want to kind of get into a position close that position within say a day or a few hours or say a quarter or say a week but investors are usually longer term right

6:15and that's when we are we want to kind of create that ecosystem that if you want to take a longer term exposure dollar cost averaging has been the best uh sort of way to kind of get into bitcoin and it has usually outperformed any other asset class so dollar cost averaging sort of into bitcoin has always given greater than 25 returns annualized of even

6:38if you started investing at the peak of bitcoin like if you invested when it was nineteen thousand dollars in 2017 and start started dollar cost averaging you would have gotten uh you would be up 80 percent over the last three years so when that sort of thing is there we want to kind of educate more people into that and that overall makes the ecosystem stronger right so

6:59traders are one aspect of it and they are very very important but apart from that if we kind of bring the bystanders who don't know how to kind of get into crypto and a lot of them did lose significant amount of money in 2017 with the ico boom with rising prices and ethereum being 1400 and then going to 80 in a span of a year a lot of people kind of lost money

7:21and that's when we're like here uh how how do we tell a new user to get into crypto and do it in a way where he doesn't lose money right and that's where dc kind of came into being and that's something that we are kind of uh really proud that we've kind of bought this sort of a concept and we're trying to kind of take it to the next level and by bringing in about a million users

7:43over the next 18 months wow that's ambitious and that's great garv that you are continuing to expand and i was researching into bitpns and i know you're expanding also in the other way with you know more newer tools and speculative assets and nfts and d5 can you talk about what bitbns and your team is doing in terms of moving into the new space and how you're working within the

8:06decentralized finance ecosystem right so uh we kind of were closely uh monitoring what was happening in the d5 space and overall uh one of the goals with crypto is uh that over a period of time the prominence or the dominance of centralized entities should kind of go down right this was the same problem that banks were kind of having and if again a large

8:33centralized exchange become custodians of different things that's something that's going to be problematic in the longer run right uh and that's where there are there are incidents where things can kind of go wrong now when we kind of take that into context uh the rise of d5 and things that are kind of happening there is a very very promising trend and uh i kind of see that over a longer

8:57period of time or say 10-15 years i see banks becoming non-existent right so d5 has kind of a lot of things that it it's kind of empowering and if we create a seamless user experience which to a certain degree is happening with uni swap but that's still for the one percent of the users it's not for say the larger masses if that becomes more and more seamless over a period of time

9:23uh we are going to onboard a massive set of users and kind of grow from there right now when this sort of thing started happening right uh that's when we kind of figured out like how do we participate into this even being a centralized exchange we need to kind of ensure we need to participate in this uh otherwise we are going to make ourselves extinct right uh

9:42most of the synchronized exchanges uh kind of start realizing that after seeing the use of volumes and people kind of actively getting into it um even when a lot of the other things were not uh as uh seamless like the fees are really really high uh gas fees and transaction fees on something like a unisom but we saw a lot of kind of transaction volume happening there now when we kind

10:05of take that into context uh we also saw there where uh of course when there is a lot of uh like uh user activity on a certain thing there is also a lot of wrong things that kind of start happening on some certain platforms right now what we started observing was that uh with unisof there were issues with something called as rockpools right so there was liquidity kind of getting

10:29added for different projects people got an option to kind of participate in some really really interesting things but a lot of people were also losing ex like excessive amount of money uh where they're participating into projects where there was not a lot of transparency there was not a lot of uh due diligence that could have been done and abruptly uh team tokens were kind of taking away

10:51uh all the liquidity and all this sort of issues started happening now when we kind of put that into context we figured out we need to figure out a solution so uh we kind of started analyzing the entire landscape one of the landscape part of it was um that hey uh one is you have these centralized launch pads like the finance launch pad okay x jump start and all these sort of

11:13platforms where there is one project that comes in a month or something of that sort and people kind of then have to do a lot of crazy things just to kind of get a token or a ticket or something of that sort and that's a lucky draw that kind of happens there right uh and there is still not a lot of voice that users can have what sort of project should come how

11:35things should kind of transpire and all of that the second aspect and the extreme end of the other aspect is unisov where all crazy type of projects can kind of come and people also lose a significant amount of money when they participate in something which is not legit or scam or truck pools start happening you know and when we analyze the data we figured

11:55out like sixty percent of unisof projects get rock pulled within six hours that's crazy like six hours you won't even complete your sleep and by the time you've broken up the money's gone so yeah and that's for sixty percent of the projects which is insane right so and that's when we're like how do we figure out a solution to this right and we when we started analyzing that that's

12:16when we kind of uh came up with something called as ascent uh we call it um the website name is launchons.com essentially what happens with that is um we kind of bring carefully wetted projects onto the platform people can also vote and bring certain set of projects that they want to kind of participate and everything is on chain so it's entirely decentralized

12:40and people get um a part of the money that is being raised on the platform so say if a couple of million dollars are getting raised three percent of that is the fees of the platform and that is getting redistributed back to users now that's kind of really really interesting uh in one sense like if you kind of take say io platforms and all they charge a

13:00crazy amount of money like a finance launch pad would charge uh say a couple of million dollars and then there is t at the tokens they kind of take in all of that and again there is no transparency like you can like team can have tokens and they can kind of dump on the masses and all this sort of thing can happen right and that's when we kind of build this

13:18decentralized on-chain solution like hey this is a foolproof sort of a way to kind of participate in the best of the projects and you can have additional features so you have a feature like westing so team tokens would be locked for a period of say a year or two years or whatever the time is decided and they are released in a monthly fashion and everything is visible on chain like

13:43on ether scan you can see hey was the team had 2.4 million tokens and only 100 000 tokens have gone after the first month and so on and so forth right uh this is one part of it then there are a lot of other things that we kind of built under that that how do we kind of give air drops how do these teams kind of bootstrap their community like any project needs to kind of have an active

14:05community to kind of start working and scaling across from there and some of these things we kind of kept uh working on and we launched it um last month um in testnet we saw pretty strong response we went live with the main net and we kind of concluded uh the first pre-sale uh offer project uh just a couple of days back and uh it went really really well so we

14:29kind of bought a project called auro pocket uh oro pocket is uh is trying to bring um the real world assets on chain so something like a gold or silver they're kind of bringing all that on chain uh via synthetics and people can kind of systematically participate into that and as i said we also have a product like

14:55uh an sip for bitcoin we are collaborating with auro pocket and then people can also do an sip into gold or sip into real wool assets that people want to kind of do so that's something that we're kind of building so bring transparency lower the cost of launching for a project give them the existing community and the best of the projects also kind of get listed on bit bns

15:18uh uh platform and all that sort of things are kind of happening that's really interesting expansion carve i i see where you're heading with this similar to what finance has done where you have that centralized exchange the foundation there's a launch pad there's a decentralized exchange you tap into the defense centralized finance ecosystem and now you're helping

15:38projects in a more transparent and fair way uh the ones that deserve to be able to grow and not the ones that are you know just looking for um to to exit so that's great that you're that you are also including that because it's sort of like the first step at least for your exchange to have great trading pairs and you can get coins that are early that are actually legitimate coins that

16:02actually started on your platform as well so i really like that now we're running out of time garof but if the viewers are looking to follow along with the launch pad or maybe they have a project or maybe they're just looking to trade and learn more what's the best way for them to find out more and join the community right so they can kind of um join us on

16:24telegram and uh i'm also fairly active and telling them the uh admins and other groups they can just reach me out from there and uh we've been kind of really really open in terms of kind of inviting projects kind of helping them out in terms of how should they kind of strategize their launch and kind of scale it along from there so essentially our goal we kind of see

16:46is how do we kind of make the ecosystem broader and better one is kind of bringing the investor class so the profit is around that angle then we kind of uh go towards where cryptos and roots are there right like where we want to decentralize things and people should hold custody of their things people should be able to participate in the best of the things that are out there which

17:07was not happening earlier right so most of the uh greatest startups out there in the world people can't directly participate in that it's the most uh like vcs or people who already have a lot of money they can kind of participate in those sort of things but that's kind of inverted world right like uh you are allowed to participate in lottery tickets and lottery ticket has

17:30more sort of spend than movies plus sports and all of that combined and you can't participate in investing into startups which are legit and all right uh and that's where we're kind of bringing that to the users with governance in place that you can put things in checks and balances so that things cannot go wrong like as an uh if you have team tokens lock advisor

17:54tokens lock and other things and you have milestone based funding release that's also something really interesting we have a lot of teams kind of promise certain things and then they do not kind of execute it so we have milestone based funding release as well which teams can kind of do and that's something that's kind of really exciting so would love to kind of

18:14take this opportunity to invite the best of the projects and uh they would also kind of get an access to a really large community that we kind of have over at grid pns that's great garb i will leave all of those links in the description box below it's been a pleasure speaking with you all the best with bitbns the launchpad and everything in d5 going

18:34forward and let's follow up in the near future cool thanks gabe uh thanks a lot ashton a great having over again