Blockchain critical for India: 40u40 2024 Neeraj Khandelwal, CoinDCX

Neeraj Khandelwal, Co-Founder of CoinDCX, shares his entrepreneurial journey from financial cryptography to pioneering blockchain technology. Khandelwal, a IIT Bombay graduate, feels proud about his journey as it was full of challenges due to market pessimism and regulatory hurdles in the field of crypto assets market. He co-founded CoinDCX, India's biggest crypto investment app by volume, with Sumit Gupta, who have been friends for the last 15 years since their engineering coaching days in Kota to joining IIT Bombay in the same Branch but different years. 

“The most difficult problem I have faced during my entire journey is when I started CoinDCX along with Sumit in 2018. During the same time, the RBI came up with a banking ban on this industry which was super challenging, forcing many companies and startups to shut down,” recalls Khandelwal during an interaction with Fortune India.

“Not just friends and family, everyone around us was questioning why to start a startup in an industry which is not being favoured by the government or the RBI…However, our persistence kept us going, which is key when you are doing a startup. A lot of times you need to show just unreasonable persistence,” he says.

Khandelwal believes that blockchain technology is critical for a country like India and it can be directly added to existing applications. “You don't need to build a completely new world of mobile applications as blockchain can be integrated directly inside the apps that people are already using like Zomato, BookMyShow, and hundreds of other apps, where blockchains can add value. We are building a platform which allows digital India to harness the power of blockchain.”