Hello everyone! I wanted to break ground on this new company blog by taking this opportunity to introduce the company and myself to the Crypto community.
I’m Gautam Sampathkumar, a product guy, software engineer and team builder for the last 15+ years. Most of my experience has been with small startups backed by some pretty important experience at a few large companies like Cisco, Paypal and Bloomberg.
The vast majority of that experience has been in Silicon Valley, although I’m writing to you today from my hometown Chennai, India having moved back here in Dec 2017 to pursue new entrepreneurial dreams in the Crypto space.
Having an education in Economics, an interest in Geo-Politics and a career in Software pretty much sealed my fate as far as ‘going deep down the rabbit hole’ on Bitcoin and Crypto is concerned. I studied it and tried to understand it’s potential implications briefly in 2013–2014, but was pretty much completely engrossed in it by early 2017.
By June 2017, all of my waking non-office and weekend hours were being consumed learning more about Bitcoin, Blockchain technology and other Cryptocurrencies. Much like pulling a thread from a sweater, the more I read and learned, the more unanswered questions seemed to pop up. I managed to do this for the next 5–6 months with my regular job heading up engineering for a Marketing Automation startup in San Mateo, California until I gave up. On my job.
I decided that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me to do something I felt truly passionate about both from a technical and philosophical standpoint. As I remarked to a friend as I was packing my bags to leave the US (California is an expensive place to try to bootstrap something): ‘With the Blockchain, Satoshi Nakamoto managed to wrap something I love, Technology, in an ideology I deeply believed in (let’s call it Freedom)’.
The way I felt at the time was best explained through one of my favorite scenes in Rounders, a poker-based movie, where Matt Damon’s professor answers when asked about his career “choices” with a simple “what choice”. There really was none. Bitcoin had taken a hold of me and I wasn’t one to wonder about what might happen if I had gone down this path or the other.
Enter India.
I moved back to India and mulled over the next move. I was interested in the full Crypto stack and I started at the bottom. I spent the first few months setting up a GPU mining farm (with Nvidia 1060s, 1070s and 1080tis for the GPU buffs reading this) mining ZCash and Ethereum along with other more esoteric ones to come later like Ravencoin, GRIN and Beam.
The subsequent mining difficulty increases led us to expand more into ASIC mining which we did with the Z9 mini (still one of my favorite miners) and later on with some used S9s. It was fun. I really needed to have a deep understanding of this piece of the Crypto puzzle. Call this more a hobby and fulfilling a fascination than a real company.
Enter Indra Crypto Capital.
We spent the next few months in stealth mode developing a new startup, Indra Crypto Capital, with a single vision: To build the most user-friendly experience to help users interested in Cryptocurrencies invest, secure and deploy their Crypto assets in the way they were meant to be, for the long term.
While we envision all of this being delivered through a single user experience at some point, we are starting with a number of different products that will eventually be part of a unified experience.
Here’s what our world class team of Engineers, Marketers, Product Managers and DevOps folks are building:
- IndraDEX — Decentralized Ethereum and EOS exchange.
- IndraX — Crypto exchange including Person-to-Person trading.
- Airavat — Simple, easy to use, Cryptocurrency wallet
- Vajra — Indian-rupee backed Digital asset
- IndraEOS — EOS block producer candidate
- YieldWallet — Staking-as-a-service provider
We will spend the next few weeks discussing these products more in-depth and providing periodic updates on progress. We will also be putting out a lot of educational material about different Cryptocurrencies, Technologies and the overall ecosystem. Finally, we will be taking principled, well thought through, opinionated stances on various regulatory, government and industry related issues because after all, not having an opinion is boring.
With the recent developments in India from a legal standpoint, we also plan to be a voice for advocacy,support and increasing awareness of Cryptocurrencies with regulators and pretty much anyone willing to talk to us with an open mind. We believe in Crypto and it’s ability to make India a thriving economic powerhouse, should the Government adopt the right approach to it.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned to hear more from us in the coming weeks!