Nuo Exchange 🇮🇳 — The simplest way to invest in Bitcoin

Coming Soon in India

A Brief History of Crypto in India

Since the time crypto has caught the attention of investors across the globe, India has been playing a catch-up game. There has never been a level playing field for us to truly participate in the booming crypto market. As soon as some significant activity started occurring in 2017 and 2018, the RBI came up with a circular which prohibited regulated entities(banks) to deal with crypto companies. This led to many exchanges shutting down and curbed any further innovation that could have possibly helped in bringing mainstream adoption of crypto in India. In some respite to the Indian crypto community, the Supreme Court quashed the RBI circular and opened the crypto market for business once again. Of late, we are also seeing a lot of interest from global investors in India. WazirX has been acquired by Binance. CoinDCX has recently raised their Series A from Polychain Capital and Coinbase Ventures. We expect to see a lot more crypto activity to happen in India in the coming months.

But interestingly, even at its peak in 2017–18, total active crypto investors stood at a meagre ~5 Lac(as compared to ~8.5 Cr mutual fund investors). A major reason for this was that all crypto products have been extremely complicated to use and expect users to have a high level of sophistication already.

Now that we have looked at the stats, let’s dive into a story of a person who is one of the 8.5 Cr investors but not yet invested in bitcoin. His name is Ayaan.

An Investor’s Perspective

Ayaan has been investing 40% of his income into mutual funds and over the course of 5 years has been getting an average yearly return of 8%. Once in 2 months, he reads up about different investment opportunities online and tries to stay on top of the market. He has come across ‘bitcoin’ multiple times and has tried to find out more info about it. Somehow the essence of investing into bitcoin has always been eluding him. But because he has seen a 200% growth in the value of bitcoin since he had first heard about it, he is convinced that he should invest ~5% of his portfolio into bitcoin. But to his dismay, he has another experience to set him back.

He is used to investing his funds with apps like Zerodha Coin, ETMoney, PayTM Money, Groww which look like this:

Traditional financial products — simple and intuitive

But when he opens any crypto app, this is what he sees:

Current crypto products — complicated and unfamiliar

This is so overwhelming for Ayaan who is already in 2 minds whether to start investing or not. Firstly, the KYC process would take 2 days to complete. Then, if all goes well, he has to make sense of this all-new interface with so many graphs and other moving parts. Being a casual investor that he is, new terms like ‘market depth’ & ‘order volume’ make Ayaan feel extremely anxious. And finally, there is no easy way to even transfer INR and keep a track of his bitcoin investment if he still decides to take the plunge.

This entire experience is what we are trying to solve. We understand that our users are already skeptical about investing in bitcoin and we want to make sure that they get a familiar looking interface which would instantly instill trust and not make them anxious about taking the plunge.

Introducing Nuo Exchange

That is the core thesis behind the creation of Nuo Exchange— democratize access to crypto investments in India! There are 2 parts to any crypto platform: sourcing liquidity of crypto assets and providing a great user experience. We have taken a conscious decision to focus on the user experience and partner with existing players who have solved the former. Our launch partners will be WazirX and Bitbns, both of which are the top liquidity providers in India. While existing platforms have focused on the frequent trading use-case, we have focussed on making the experience of investing into bitcoin as simple as investing into stocks or mutual funds.

A sneak peek into what the app will look like.

These are some of the steps we are taking to reach there:

• Instant KYC: With our automated processes and the right partners, new users will be able to complete their KYC and start investing instantly.
• Multiple Investing Options: Invest via your debit card, netbanking, bank transfer or your favourite UPI app.
• Live-chat Support: Say goodbye to writing emails and waiting for the usual 48 hours for a reply. We have live chat support integrated right into the app powered by Intercom.
• Exciting Rewards: We encourage our users to invest into bitcoin. Get a scratchcard for every time you invest. Every scratchcard has a guaranteed random reward waiting to be redeemed.
• Buy Bitcoin for Free: To encourage early believers in Nuo, we have decided to make all investments zero-fee until Sep 2020.

We are currently in private beta(reach out on our Twitter for early access) and will be launching on Google Play Store on Aug 15. Become part of creating this ecosystem in India by signing up on Nuo for early access.

About Nuo

Nuo.Network is the #5 DeFi protocol globally with total locked in value exceeding $30 million (INR 231 crores) till date. Nuo is backed by notable investors including Sequoia Surge, Polychain Capital, among others. The 3 founders had started Nuo in 2018 but have been working together since 2015. The team is a bunch of diverse collective thinkers and doers, continuously reimagining our products and practices to enhance the user experience and help users do what they love in new ways.