Sathvik Vishwanath: Empowering Crypto Accessibility & Communications

A proud father, a loving husband, and the Co-founder & CEO of India's first crypto trading and exchange platform. We surely need to know more about him.

Yes, we do! We are talking about none other than Mr Sathvik Vishwanath here. Sathvik has not only been a mentor and TEDx speaker, but he also is an angel investor and a staunch supporter of #IndiaWantsBitcoin. He calls himself a decentralisation maximalist. Sathvik is indeed a successful entrepreneur whose heart and soul is into putting innovations into practice and making disruptive technologies work! Let us dive deeper as to what makes Sathvik, the man he is today, where he comes from, where he stands and what vision his eyes hold for his fellow countrymen. Let us start with his early childhood and education.

Education

He was a normal school going boy from Tumkur, a district near the Karnataka capital - Bengaluru. He started with his computer classes and this supercomputing machine caught his attention. He was fascinated with computers and would chase answers to questions like what computer program is, how the calculator and other games work, what is the internet and how the information and news flow on the web. Everything about the machine hardware and software programs kept him busy and excited. This continued till he got out of school and enrolled himself in college. Siddaganga Institute of Technology was his alma mater where he did his four-year degree course of Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics and Communication. By the time of his graduation he was a full-grown techie and now was ready to face the corporate world of IT. Later on, he opted to undergo another degree in the field of Business and Information Technology from the University of Melbourne - Melbourne Business School.

Career and Entrepreneurial voyage

While growing up in his town, he would spend most of his time in the cyber cafe. He started helping people in setting up their email account, filling their forms, making their websites and other internet related stuff. This would also mean unlimited access in the cyber cafe, a lot of learning opportunities, helping the local community people and the early stages of him being a budding entrepreneur. He became a pro in making websites for people.

After his graduation, he joined Cognizant Technologies in 2005. He was an excellent programmer already. This MNC gave him the experience of the world and how corporates work in a professional setup. After taking the relevant experience, the entrepreneur in him came alive and now his quest to understand the business led him to apply for higher studies. He wanted to understand businesses & finance and amalgamate it with his inherent love for technology and innovations. He went for further studies in 2007.

In 2007, he heard about Second Life which is a virtual world platform with many millions of people as avatars building out the world. He expanded the game by providing scripting services to businesses in Second Life and named his company VentureNext. The transactions would take place on PayPal, which however charged substantial transaction fees and other conversion and handling charges.

In his attempt to save on such fees, he got himself accustomed to bitcoin and then he founded CoinMonk Ventures which endeavoured to bring cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin awareness to the populace. This firm in Dec 2013, after being an organiser of the Global Bitcoin Conference, launched a web service called Unocoin.com which emphasised providing bitcoin services to the masses. This included storage, buying and selling of bitcoin, thereby advancing and accelerating the pursuit of blockchain technology. Unocoin was a baby product of CoinMonk Ventures which became an independent entity in 2015.

About Unocoin

Presently, Mr Sathvik Vishwanath is the Co-founder & CEO of Unocoin.

Bitcoin, since 2009 is the world’s first open-source and decentralised digital currency and payment network. Bitcoin is based on blockchain technology and is changing the way we finance. This is the same way the web changed publishing or the internet changed how we communicate.

Sathvik also has volunteering experience. He has been organising meetups around bitcoin and cryptocurrency from July 2013 till the present. These meetups are conducted time and again in multiple Indian cities, majorly Bengaluru, and also virtually. He is also an angel investor and advisor to many technology-based start-ups.

Sathvik Vishwanath is now a successful entrepreneur and you can read more about him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sathvikv/