This Sequoia-backed startup lets users access multiple crypto exchanges from one place

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This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Decrypt Asia where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews related to blockchain. This is heavily revised from the original transcript. For the full interview, go here or here.

Sharan Nair is the senior vice president of marketing and business development at CoinSwitch, a Sequoia-backed cryptocurrency aggregator. A cryptocurrency aggregator allows users to buy and sell multiple cryptocurrencies across various exchanges without creating multiple accounts.

Prior to CoinSwitch, Nair was the vice president of marketing and communications at Unocoin, one of India’s largest fiat-to-crypto exchanges. In this interview, he talks about his crypto journey, how CoinSwitch works, and his outlook on blockchain.

How did you get involved in the crypto ecosystem?

Straight out of college, my first job was with Unocoin. This was around 2014. Back then, we were just a small team and nobody, including myself, really understood what cryptocurrencies were.

But as we started to dig in, going out and talking to more people about crypto, we saw that there was interest and that it was being replicated across the globe. It’s been three and a half years now, and I’m still learning every day.

What led you to join CoinSwitch?

One thing I understood while talking to CoinSwitch’s founders was there were some problems that none of the current exchanges were solving. For one, most exchanges were not customer-centric. There was also this gap where users couldn’t discover coins and find cheaper rates through one platform. They had to move from one exchange to another.

The founders are traders themselves so they realized, “OK, we need to put all of this in one place.” That’s the birth of CoinSwitch, which aggregates multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. Users can come to our platform to compare the prices on our partner exchanges without creating an account in those exchanges. They can also use their own balance, so they don’t have to store their coins with us.

We are about 25 people now, most of whom are doing product development.

How do I get started with CoinSwitch?

When you come to CoinSwitch, you just have to put in your email address and password to create an account. After that, you will see two fields: one asks about the coin that you have and the other is for the coin you’re interested in.

Let’s say you want to convert bitcoin into Ethereum, so you select bitcoin from the field that asks what coin you have then Ethereum from the other field. It will show you the conversion as well as all the available offers and exchanges.

After selecting an exchange, you have to make the payment through a QR code. Then, after the payment is processed on the blockchain, the amount of Ethereum goes to your Ethereum wallet.

We started with cryptocurrencies but we do support payments now. People can buy using their credit cards. Since we’re an exchange aggregator, we pass on all the functionalities of our partner exchanges to our users.

Tell us about the business model.

Some of our partner exchanges provide us with an affiliate fee. For other exchanges, we charge add-on fees.

What are you planning to work on in the next 12 months?

What are the risks you see right now?

What are your thoughts about the blockchain space?