With $250K seed round, Mumbai-based entrepreneurs launch India first cryptobanking platform

Mumbai-based entrepreneurs Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma, have launched crypto banking platform Nuo Bank.

The virtual bank will help users store savings in crypto format on a blockchain, and get them virtual share in the revenue of the bank.

"Nuo acts as financial control centre to store, spend and grow your cryptocurrency of your choice. It aims to create a global alternative to traditional banking and help accelerate adoption of cryptocurrencies," said Varun Deshpande, co-founder of Nuo Bank.

India finally have it's global crypto product it can be proud of. Nuo is putting India on the crypto map. https://t.co/ZbSeqv8dUz

— Varun Deshpande (Nuo) (@thebitsian) March 21, 2018

The startup got seed funding of $250,000 from PayU India CEO Amrish Rau and managing director Jitendra Gupta.

Nuo Bank will offer about 20 per cent of its 1 billion tokens, called Nuo Coins, to customers, the value of which will be connected to smart contracts. These tokens can be sold on exchanges used within the Nuo Bank ecosystem for transactions.

The platform plans to generate revenue from transaction fees or merchant discount rate (MDR) on payments of its products.

The platform estimates crypto economy to be $3 trillion by 2022. It plans to operate in 13 emerging markets. The startup is giving 100 tokens each to the first 10000 users. It claims to have 5,000 customers in less than two days of launch.

After its initial boom, cryptocurrency, however, got lambasted by most of central banks of the countries. It has been facing flaks across the segments. Last month, Goldman Sachs again cautioned investors against the fall in the value of cryptocurrencies.

Besides Bank of America, digital currency is facing flak in India also, where the government and the country’s biggest financial institution RBI have issued various warnings against cryptocurrency trade.

Late last year,  the Indian government asked consumers to be alert before investing in virtual currency like Bitcoin and compared it with notorious Ponzi schemes.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency trader South Korea last year also banned its financial institutions in dealing with virtual currency such as bitcoin, litecoin, IOTA, and others.

Nuo: Website