Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Sanghita. Sanghita is a prominent figure obviously in the financial industry.
She has had a wealth of experience as a two-time founder, an executive leader, an angel investor. She’s also been on the board in various financial firms across the emerging markets. Her latest venture is called Solus Finance.
It is aimed at revolutionizing futures trading by making it more accessible, less risky, and socially engaging as well. Basically, this was a fairly interesting conversation because we dealt and talked a lot about what futures are, what option trading is, what binary trading is, and what are the kind of upcoming features that Solus Finance is going to be providing to its users. So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this.
Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Sanghita, thank you so much for making the time to speak to us today.
How are you doing? I’m doing great, gearing up for Token2049 Dubai, flying out there from the US on Sunday. So yeah, how are you? And thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
No, the pleasure is all mine. I’m doing wonderfully. Well, thank you so much for asking.
Yes, a lot of people are gearing up for Token2049 and we come to that. For our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself, your background, how you got into the space, please? Yeah, you know, initially born and brought up in India from a very small place in Bihar, which is very close to, connected to the border area of both Nepal and Bangladesh. I did my basic education over there, then moved to Bhubaneswar, did my engineering, then spent quite some time in Bangalore working in Sony, Siemens, tried, always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
So I tried a couple of things over there, 2011-12 in Bangalore, of course didn’t work out. And so out of frustration, just left Bangalore, I was trying to find some more opportunity. And then that time Siemens was starting their brand new, you know, full arm of mobility automation, which included really automation, airways automation.
So I just joined them. So I was the first one to build, you know, European train control system automation for Denmark. Grew the team one person to 37 people over, you know, 18 months.
And then I decided like, you know, to move out and again, think something else. So had no clue at that time what to do. So just resigned and was sitting and without any option, without any next plan B. And, you know, was talking to a lot of my friends and someone candidly told me like, you know, when you don’t know what to do, just do MBA.
I decided, I decided to, you know, write GMAT and then came to States. It’s been more than 10 years now, but I did my MBA from Arizona State University. And that’s where, you know, I started getting very good exposure and entrepreneurship.
I bumped into one of my classmates. He was already running as a startup called Workint. So I joined him as a fourth member of the team.
I learned a lot of things. They were actually Saudi Arabia based company, but then their headquarter was in US. So, you know, a lot of exposure on like, you know, how to do fundraise, how you start building teams and a lot of other things.
I really enjoyed that journey a lot. Probably, you know, the thing that I was looking for, I think I got it there. Then there was some, you know, visa issues and other things.
So I had to take up a full time job. So I joined Western as an auditor. I did a lot of regulatory audits, financial audits.
So I still have a lot of connects that I know people who work in SEC securities and CFTCs in US because we work closely with them. And that time Western Union also was going through a 5 million fine due to some compliance miss that happened. So we were very closely working with them.
So, you know, you always look back and connect the dot and then you realize like, oh yeah, great, that happened. Now I can use those relationships and all those. So I mean, I think that was a very good turning point for me.
So, you know, audit is the center of financial systems. And so I got a lot of exposure with a lot of leadership. And then Western Union Bank, which does a lot of trading and hedging.
So the head of the bank picked me up and they wanted me to look into their trading strategies. And also I did a lot of trading and hedging on Forex for Western Union. From there, I moved into payments inside the company.
And then I was heading their all payout methods, basically like, you know, wallet payout, bank payout, card payout. And that’s where in 2018, actually, we were trying to do a pilot for crypto P2P payout, which never flew. But that was my journey actually into blockchain and crypto.
That’s how I started in blockchain and crypto. So I was really fascinated. We built a team.
We kind of like built the product, but for several reasons it didn’t fly. But then I became a full time person into, you know, on the sideways, full time person into crypto, very much hands on, on blockchain. Then, you know, I quit my job during the pandemic and started my own venture, which is, which was an HR tech.
And we did, we call it Yarnoka, with one of my experienced co-founder, and she was always a recruiter in HR. And then in 2022, I actually operationally checked out from that. And then I started thinking, what should I do? And so I did a backpack trip from, you know, Kerala to Bombay, all alone.
And I was just trying to evaluate what I was very clear that I want to do something in the field of finance, crypto. And then I kind of like bumped with some people from the crypto industry, but I was trying to tell them, like, I was, I was looking into the trend, like, you know, derivatives, spot trading was great, but I knew that derivatives is something that’s going to be the next for crypto. If I, if I look into the forex trend, right, it’s the same thing that that’s what is going to happen to crypto.
Like now you see the US has already approved ETF, what next? Next will be CFDs, next will be options. So I had that thing in my head. And I was, I bumped with some of the leaders and I bounced the idea, one of the leader that I first met, and I was bouncing the idea was Nishal Shetty.
I met him, and I told him, and he was like, yeah, there’s some potential over here, you should definitely explore. Then I came back to the States. I met with the CTO of Broadridge Finance here in New York.
They are very big into blockchain and crypto solutions. And then I again, bounced the idea over there. There also, I got a lot of, you know, good feedback that, hey, yeah, this is, there’s a lot of potential over here.
I got support from OnDeck, which is a California based accelerator venture program. And that’s how the journey of Solus started. So 2023, we kind of like started with a small MVP.
And then now, you know, we have two products, flagship products. One is already live, the other is going to come in the next couple of months. So one is, you know, more geared towards immature traders who want to probably experience crypto and how options trading works in crypto is like binary options that we have.
The other is we are working on CFD futures, which should be out in the next couple of months. We are already for the binary options, we are already revenue generating. We have more than 200 users transacting every day.
We just launched it in, you know, January, and then kind of like kept improvising the product. So we are making 2x growth since then. And we’re very optimistic that we will keep making better growth as we keep moving into the journey.
Wow, brilliant. That’s quite, quite an introduction and quite a long journey you’ve had, like with your experience in finance and somebody who stumbled upon blockchain. And now you know, you are, you’ve created a quite a phenomenal platform.
And I call it phenomenal, not just because of the tech capability, but also because of the fact like you mentioned, that you know, you’re a revenue generating platform, which is something I feel Web3 entrepreneurs do not really make it into their headline when they’re building. And you know, you just launched like a year back and because you mentioned 2023, and you have solid volumes and you have solid revenue. So more power to you, kudos for that.
Thank you so much. Yeah, the journey has been vast, lot of learning, but you know, the journey is still pending. That’s why I say miles to go before you sleep.
Yeah, I love that quote. Actually, I love that quote. Yeah, it’s a wonderful poem.
Can you tell us a little about the team? Like how big is your team? And what are you gearing up for next on the platform on Solus Finance? Yeah, see, we are still a small team at like seven, eight people right now, but I’m still hiring rigorously. So we have lent out five offers, very much struggling. So most of the hiring, especially on the tech side, I’m doing in India.
And to be honest, like very, very much struggling with this notice period and whatnot that we have established over there. So every time I hire, I have to wait, I have to either bargain or I have to do payouts for them or buyouts for them or I have to like, you know, do a lot of hip and hold to, you know, make people join early because I mean, we are a startup, two months for us to wait for a resource to join is just like killing us, right? Yeah, that’s not possible. Yeah.
So we are really rigorously hiring. So far, we have been doing a lot of marketing with freelancers. Now we are building a team of five people in house gradually, three of them, we have already extended out the offer, some of them are joining next week.
So yeah, the team size will increase to, you know, to 13 people in the next couple months. Yeah, it’s wonderful. And tell me what is like the next big milestone for you guys? See, the idea is very clear, like, you know, from the binary option side, we want to get 1000-1500 users per day to our platform.
That’s our next goal. And all the marketing effort that we are looking for is to achieve. And again, by the end of Q2, early Q3, we want to launch our CFD futures too.
So I think those will be the biggest milestone. So the tech people that we are hiring will be mostly focusing on the CFD futures and the marketing people are going to work on the growth. That’s the strategy that we have.
Right. So you are simplifying future trading, right? So can you explain a little perhaps for our listeners, what is future trading? And can you explain how leveraging Web3 technology contributes to achieving this particular goal? Yeah, see, I mean, look, futures, I mean, I go to this lot of interviews, and people do ask me, like, what is futures trading? If I have to explain something in a very layman, then I will say, like, you know, generally, in a spot trade, your strategy is buy something at less cost and sell at high. Now, if suppose you buy something at less cost, and the price of that asset goes down, then you are making loss period, right? You can’t do much.
Yeah. What you can do is that you can keep buying more at that lower price to hedge your risk. Whereas in futures, the good part is you can make money whether the price can go up or down, doesn’t matter.
It is just your cognitive ability to predict whether the price of the asset will move up from a particular spot price or it will go down from a particular spot price. Regardless, whatever the asset move is, if your understanding of the movement is correct, you will be able to make money. So, that’s why a lot of futures trading platforms are dominated by, you know, mostly like two kind of people.
One are the speculators, traders, because they are very good in predicting, you know, the market movements. You don’t have to buy the asset and, you know, you don’t have to worry how do I protect my asset, my asset will get hacked and other things. You can just make money every day through, you know, through playing on the price.
The good part is, you know, if you do a lot of buy and sell on spot trading, you know, it’s not that convenient, but you can do a lot of buy and sell in futures every day, keep a goal and make, you know, every day income through that. So, you can make a full time profession out of it. The second most important segment of people who actually dominate these sections are actual institutions.
So, for example, like, you know, if I am a big institution and I am holding lot of Bitcoins, right, and I know, suppose, let’s go back to 2022, right, the Bitcoin crashed. So, how do I hedge my risk? Like, you know, how do I hedge my risk? So, a lot of these people, they hedge their risk of their underlying asset by actually doing futures trading. So, if I was, let, if we go back to 2022 and I know that the market of Bitcoin is, you know, gradually crashing, is going to, going down.
So, I’ll take sell position short, I’ll take short positions and I’ll try to put lot more money and hedge all the asset valuation that I lost through this futures trading and hedge, hedge the risk over there. So, institutions generally do hedge the risk of their underlying asset. Speculators, retail traders, they try to do more to play on the price movement and make daily income from it.
We do simplify futures because, you know, there is lot of thing in futures. If you see the current exchanges, you have to understand lot of thing, for example, you know, how to use leverage, how to use stop loss, what is the spread. So, and the whole, you know, order book, getting to understanding of like how and where to start, I think those are very big barriers for futures trading.
So, what we try to do is like, you know, we try to keep people more guarded, guarded in the sense of like, we do not, we don’t want to get people into like, you know, 100 leverage, although those are all great, but those are very risky that I am going to talk in next few minutes. Again, then we are looking for some, you know, stop loss kind of through AI based so that based on your patterns, you know, we should have a stop loss for you rather than you putting a stop loss. I met several people who are actually doing futures trading and they were like, you know, I have, I have taken a leverage of 20x.
But can you tell me what is margin, I don’t understand what is margin. I’m very shocked with people because, you know, people when they see that we can make money out of something, they get very excited, they try to make use of it. But if they don’t have the right tools, they will end up losing a lot of money.
And that’s where we come in picture. That’s our uniqueness, actually, that we want to solve that problem through tech tech, better user experience, more handholding and education. Now, coming back to, you know, leverage, why I was saying that, you know, leverage is a very, very good tool, but also very scary tool is, you know, if you are, if you want to buy something of, you know, say, 100 dollars and you have to put 100 dollars.
But if you take leverage, then you just put 10 dollars and you take 10x leverage, the contract or the asset that you are buying will be still worth of 100, have to pay 100, you have to pay only 10. You can start at a very low investment. So, think like, think this like you are taking a loan from the exchange, kind of.
Think in a very layman term, you are rather than putting your entire 100 dollar to buy that 100 dollar contract, you are putting 10, other rest part exchange is taking the risk and putting it to you. But in general, this becomes, this is very risky, because, you know, if you make profit, of course, you will make 10x profit. But if you lose, you are going to lose 10x too.
So, most people who are just starting, they get very fascinated about the fact that, you know, I have to do very low investment and I can make, you know, 10x more return, it is great. But this tool are very, very important that you understand how to use these tools, otherwise you will end up losing more money than you are making. That’s why these tools becomes very important and scary.
So, again, that’s where also Solus comes in picture, you know, based on your trading experience and your trading behavior, we recommend, we will be recommending, of course, the platform is not live yet. So, some of the ideas that we have like, we will be recommending you guys like, hey, you should take, for this kind of asset, you should take this much leverage, for this kind of asset based on your trading pattern, do this kind of a stock loss and other things. So, you know, we want to bring, the idea is we want to empower the retail investors more and more to actually exploit the power of derivative trading, because there is a lot of potential, you can actually, if you are do, if done right, you can actually make a lot of money.
But the fact is, you know, 90% people loses money in derivatives. And that’s why we want to bring this guardrails to help people get rewarded. Okay, this is very interesting.
So, you know, you’ve given quite an overview of future trading, and you explain certain terms, I think that that will be very helpful to our listeners. You mentioned that a certain part of the platform is not live right now. But you had mentioned that, you know, you have 200 daily active users.
So, what part of the platform are those active users utilizing? And can anyone sign up platform? Yeah. So, remember, in the beginning, I was saying that we have two flagship product, one is the futures, one is the binary options. So, the binary options is live, the futures will be live by end of Q2 or early Q3.
And so, a lot of this, because we were talking about futures, that’s why I said like, that’s not live. But binary option is live, anyone can go trade, there is a full demo version also that where you can practice, practice, develop yourself and then put money and then trade. So, you know, you can try out both the version, master yourself and then go and do the options trading.
So, that is totally live, anyone can do it. Anyone from any, any part of the world can do except certain countries, which we have, which we do not have the licenses for. So, you for example, like OPEC sanctioned countries, we don’t allow.
There are some like Canada is not allowed. So, there are certain countries is blocked. But other than that, you can access from anybody.
Okay. So, I was under the impression that binary trading is illegal in India. Is that the case? Or has that changed recently? No, binary trading is not illegal in India.
There is binary trading and CFDs both are unregulated, I will say. Okay. And also, we are only focusing on crypto.
So, the crypto is also currently. Oh, yeah. All right.
Okay. So, can you tell me a little about, you know, because we are talking about finance and the platform deals with funds of users. Can you tell us a little about the risk management strategies that you have in place to ensure security of user funds? Yep.
So, you know, we are very, very productive about what we do here. So, first of all, we are not completely fully, we are not a decentralized platform complete. So, you know, a lot of things are centralized.
And so, we conduct regular audits. We have partnered with PCIL audit, which is a more finance, financial and web 2.0 firm who conducts regular audits for us. We conduct a lot of AML programs because, you know, we are operationally registered in the US.
So, we follow a lot of US regulations in terms of AML, in terms of compliance protocols that we keep doing so that there is no fraud. Our funds are not being used by any bad element. Other than that, you know, we run a lot of vulnerability scan, InfoSec scan, and we are actually working to onboard one of, I cannot disclose much, but one of the very experienced person from crypto, one of the leading crypto exchange who looks after the security of those exchanges.
We are very much close to onboard one person who can be our chief security officer. The talks are going on. And so, once we have those, we will be having much more rigorous controls in terms of protecting ourselves, mostly from, you know, phishing attacks and kind of the login attempts that we get from, you know, countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and others.
So, again, location protection is also available there. So, if you keep switching your location, you know, you will get notified in your email, two-factor authentication is actually underway to be implemented. I think by end of this month, two-factor authentication is also coming up.
So, yep. So, several measures in terms of like protecting user funds is already there and we will keep improvising that. It’s always an evolving journey.
Yeah, it’s a work in progress. I truly agree there. So, now moving perhaps a little past the financial aspect of it, because you’ve covered that enough, I would love to talk about in the, you know, in the context of communities.
So, how does your platform foster social engagement among traders? And what role do decentralized communities perhaps play in shaping your, you know, platforms, ecosystem, and the way it’s going to grow? The good part of crypto is that it is very much community-based. I think that’s a very, very good thing. We initially, to be honest, we didn’t get into direct, into binary trading at all.
We were doing more gamified price prediction thing initially. The idea was very clear that we wanted to, when our futures is, by the time we get to our futures, we already have a good amount of retail investors who can get on board. So, the price prediction was always the GPM strategy for us because it’s fun, it is easier, it gets hands down to people.
So, that’s how we started. But, you know, changing from price prediction to actually binomial was a guideline and the guidance that the community did for us. The community started asking, can we get more binomial rather than price prediction? We would love to explore that.
And then we built a small pilot and then we start seeing like a lot more people started, you know, trading and then spending and they started talking to each other. The good, the other thing is we keep getting like, you know, I’m so connected with communities, not with everyone, but still like a lot of initial people that, you know, joined us that I still get WhatsApp messages from them like, hey, can you build this feature? I think that would be great to have. So, listening to the community and then building, I think that is very advantageous rather than, you know, we as a founder thinking like, okay, this will work and then building it.
And if you try to do it and when I come from Web2 background, because most of my experience has been in Web2, again, in Web2 also communities have been, you know, grasping very nice. But I will say in Web3, it is all about community. It is completely about community, what the community wants, what they are looking for, what they are, you know, kind of like wanting is very important.
And what we have also observed in our community when we were trying to do this gamified something, price prediction or binomial, we thought, you know, mostly early immature traders will come and, you know, the age group of 18 to 24 will be that 100 group and all. We were proven wrong actually. Of course, we have users 18 to 24 age group, but a lot of our users are actually 30 plus and they spend like, you know, hours with that.
We have users who, you know, probably some part of India, they get up like 3 a.m. and they do, they keep trading morning 3 a.m., makes me surprised sometimes. Like, what are these people doing? So, yeah, I think we have listened to the community, some of the great feedback and then build the product has been advantageous. And I am really very thankful to the community for that.
Right. I think what you said makes sense, right? It is very, very pertinent as an entrepreneur or a builder really listens to the user base before building onto a feature or a platform because ultimately, you know, entrepreneurs, builders, we kind of get into our own echo chambers and we believe that, okay, this is a real problem when actually it might not really be a valid use case for the potential user base. So, that is very, very true.
And I think that is a quotable quote from this particular episode that, you know, talk to your users and figure out what they want before, you know, you actually start building on a platform itself. Now, I would love to get your perspective as a you know, how do you expect your platform to be able to perhaps change the, you know, change or disrupt the traditional financial system? Because you do come from the traditional Web 2 space, right? And you, but you are right now building in Web 3. So, I would love to know, how do you see Solus Finance fitting in this landscape and disrupting it?
See, I will talk about more on the vision, I think, because the vision, if you talk about the vision and why we are building Solus Finance, I think your question will be answered. See, I see crypto, you know, let us, let us think about this secure SEC, CFTC, their government organizations, they might categorize crypto as a security or commodity.
But actually, when we are actually coming to a user, crypto is just like forex. That is how I see it. And what I can envision from here based on several facts that I am aware of, a lot of these banks, one of my investors, he is building CBDC for Citibank, right? A lot of this bank, they do not want to, for example, Chase, there are other small bank, they do not want to own crypto and buy a lot of asset on crypto, because they are probably still skeptic.
And they think like, okay, there is a lot needs to be managed. And they do not have the resources also, because it is a growing, it is a growing and emerging. But they are not, they still want to be a play on this.
So what they do is like they go to a lot of these institutions who runs CFDs. And then they just, you know, try to be in the world of crypto through CFDs because they believe that this is going to be the next forex. So I know personally from a lot of banks do this.
You know, if you talk to B2 broker, which is one of the largest top six liquidity provider, and you ask them, you know, what kind of, you know, institutions and customers are reaching out to them for brokerage solutions on crypto, you will hear that 99% of the banks are reaching out to them and asking for brokerage solution, where the bank does not want to do it by themselves, but they want some other brokerage to do it. Why? What is the reason that they are so much interested is because they know that, you know, eventually what could be the next after ETF? It is going to be the CFDs. It is going to be like how forex became normal, you know, for anyone to trade.
It is going to be the crypto. And I envision it, we are not very far of it. I think end of next year or so, we will start seeing more and more things like this on mainstream.
So, you know, traditional finance, so the point I am trying to make to this story is an example is crypto will, is already on the journey to become a mainstream and traditional. So, the fun, you know, the crypto, the small things, it is a group of small people who are doing it. I think crypto has passed that phase, just right after the ETF being approved.
I think now it is all about just slowly, gradually it is going to come mainstream. So, I do not see after, you know, 18 months, I do not see a difference between traditional finance and crypto finance. And this is an opportunity for all of us in crypto to envision like what could be the next, look back on like what happened to stock market, look back on like what happened to forex, is going to happen for crypto, right? So, we as Solus Finance, we have envisioned that and we are just getting ready to grab that opportunity, which is going to happen in next 18 months or 20 months, right? So, that is how we are, we are envisioned, that is how we are trying to disrupt.
But I mean, I am very confident like, you know, 20 months, 18 months from now, crypto is not going to be, oh, it is a crypto, it is going to be more and more traditional. So, we are on the journey to break into that tradition. Brilliant, brilliant.
So, now moving a little past from your platform and onto the space itself, now we are entering, you know, we have already entered the new bull market. What is your take on that? What kind of products or niches do you believe as an entrepreneur would do well in this coming bull run? See, I think what was happening in last bull run was like you have any idea, anything and you were just building and people were just in FOMO, that okay, we will miss out on something and the projects were getting a lot of funds and a lot of projects did not do well because those were not well thought of. But what happened in this bull run is I think everyone has learned good lessons and everyone knows, you know, what, you know, what went wrong and they are much more aware about what can, what is going to give value and what is not.
So, I think, look, in terms of blockchain, there are two parts of it. One is crypto, one is blockchain and I think there is another part called NFT, we will talk about that too. I am not very pro and expert in NFTs, but I have my own views on that.
So, let us talk about blockchain. I think blockchain technology as it is evolving and that is where you see a lot of funds goes on the infrastructure. VCs are all into blockchain infrastructure.
Why? Because I do see a lot of, you know, usability in terms of blockchain. You see this world coin, for example, right, trying to replace passports and other things through blockchain tokenization of human details. Then I know personally, like, you know, I was in talks before even starting Solr, just to give you a little glimpse, we were starting Solr, there was a couple of ideas I was also evaluating.
And so, one of those, I was in talks with the mayor of Denver, Colorado, and they were trying to implement blockchain technology for trafficking system to control traffic. So, I do see that there is a lot of awareness, and then people are trying to experiment a lot. And then this blockchain with AI is definitely on the tech side, the projects which are bringing meaningful value with these technologies are going to be.
So, in terms of crypto, I think, you know, I’m repeating myself. In terms of blockchain, you think it’s probably, it’s mostly on the infrastructure side, which is going to do well in this particular bull run, because people have learned their lessons. Is that correct? Yep.
I think infrastructure has people, you know, investors were anyway, also investing in infra going forward. I’m just saying like, you know, in blockchain, the real world use cases, for example, implementing blockchain in RWA, the real world is it, the implementing blockchain in healthcare, implementing blockchain in more, you know, human centric things like, you know, what WorldCoin is trying to do to avoid fraud and fraudulence. I think those kind of projects are going to be the long run for next five to 10 years.
Right. For example, in 2015-16, AI started, who knew that, you know, we kept hearing about AI bot, AI chat, but look where AI came today, in 2024, right, we are talking about like, AI based coders. So basically, basic software engineering role will be eliminated next five years.
Why do you need basic software engineering role? So I think, I think those real world use cases with blockchain will also will be the will be the next five years in any project working, either providing those infrastructure or solving those real world problems through blockchain where you can stop fraud where you can keep data records where there is lesser manipulation where you can do more real world asset tokenization. I think those those kind of project will keep moving up and they have a future for next 10 years. In terms of crypto, I think, you know, I will just repeating myself is like whatever happened with Forex is going to happen with crypto in the next couple years.
So if you are envisioning anything around that, then I think all those project who are envisioning around how crypto can become a Forex kind of thing, I think they will survive and they will have a brighter future in next couple years. NFT is something where honestly, I do not have a lot of expertise, but I do understand some of the use cases. What I and I and I can be very wrong here because I’m not following NFTs very well.
But although like there’s a lot of NFTs happening, but I think what what the boom was there in last bull run, that kind of boom is not there. But NFTs are still going to exist. But again, there needs to be some more meaningful utilities of the of the NFTs that has to come through.
For example, like, you know, you can use NFTs in more event management systems. You can use NFTs on more on, you know, ticketing and e-commerce. I do think like, you know, we’ve done really well e-commerce NFT on blockchain can be a very big thing going forward.
It will just change the way, you know, we do shopping. So I think those those are some of the areas that will evolve and that can go big in future. Yeah, that’s those are the things that I think can be instrumental in next five years.
All right. OK, good to know. So, Sanghita, this has been such a lovely conversation.
I almost don’t want it to end. You know, we talked about futures and options and binary trading and whatnot regarding solus finance and what you’re building is very commendable. But, you know, we are sadly running a little out of time.
I would like to now perhaps ask you two questions. One is, do you recommend any resources or thought leaders? Would you like to recommend any to our listeners? And the other question is something that I ask everybody who comes on the show that I’m asking both of these in conjunction because they are sort of related. If you had to give some advice to, you know, a person who is perhaps coming from a Web2 background like you have and wanted to really start building in Web3, what would be your suggestions to them or the kind of resources that you would give, you know, reference to them so that they can start living on blockchain? Yeah, I think for the Web2 people, you know, I think there is not education is required.
The easiest way to get started is to join some communities, join some groups, you know, understand what they are doing. Like, you know, I can just say like how I started from Web2 to Web3 is like I started following a lot of people who are in this space, a lot of influencers who were giving a lot of information, good information about projects, what’s happening in the market. So, you know, I think the easiest way is to get started with those kind of thing.
Then eventually, like, you know, you can get into more IRL events, get in, talk to more people about it. And look, unless like you get your hands dirty, you don’t understand much. So you have to, you know, if you are into blockchain and you want to be a blockchain dev or you want to be a blockchain, you know, in the tech side of things, I would say just, you know, try to learn.
There are a lot of blockchain, for example, I think in India there is Shardium, Polygon. They do conduct a lot of, you know, educational thing where you can pick it up how to build on those blockchain. I think go for those if you want to be a techie on those and then start taking some freelance projects.
And then eventually you will start developing a sense on these technologies because, yeah, these are future belongs to blockchain and AI. So regardless, you know, whatever you are doing, just get exposure to these kinds of tech. If you are looking more on the business side, you want to get exposure on trading, crypto, NFT, I think there you have to make your hands dirty.
No matter how much you educate yourself, no matter how much you go and read newspapers and market data, I would say, but it just, you know, take some pennies, whatever money you want, you want to get started with, start doing those trading. Unless you do it, you never get the real hang of it. And then gradually, like, you know, if you start, if you buy a Bitcoin or any other currency for the matter, I would recommend if you are just starting new and you don’t have much, you just go for the, you know, stable and the prominent ones, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, LTC.
I think that’s better than other altcoins because for those you need to develop a lot of understanding. So just do that and then start following the markets, follow some good influencers who gives a lot of financial advices, but just know that, you know, very, very less people are actually knowledgeable in this space to give the right advice. So you might end up listening to wrong people and make wrong moves.
So avoid those kind of things. Yeah. So that’s the way to probably get started in from Web 2 to Web 3. My journey was different because, you know, I was just pushed into building something in Web 3. So I just got started with, you know, business and tech side all together in just three to four months.
But if you are not there, you have to do some education, go and meet people, try your hands out. That’s the only way to get started. I think that’s very good advice to give anybody who’s perhaps just starting off.
You have mentioned the caveat as well that not everybody is very knowledgeable and not everything looks is actually the way it seems. So, you know, be careful, do your own research, but get your hands dirty because that’s the only way to get in the space and to really take advantage of this technology, which is going to take over in the future entirely. And as you said, the block, you know, the future is blockchain and AI.
So you owe it to yourself and to your future to really look it up. Thank you so much, Sanghita, once again for making the time to speak to me today. Before we wrap up, any parting thoughts? Yeah, no, thank you so much for inviting.
I think, look, the parting thoughts are very clear. I think crypto has a great future, regardless of how we are dealing with a lot of regulation ambiguity. But see, this is exactly what happened years back with forex, years back with the stock markets.
So we are just going through that phase. We’re just just going through that phase. This is the right time, guys.
I keep telling a lot of people keep asking me, you know, back in India and others and like, people could keep asking me and this. And I keep telling you, look, you know, in your lifespan, you get one or two moments where there is a disruption, a grand disruption happens, and you get hold of it. Early 2000, it was internet.
People who got hold of it, they made it big. They are at really great positions now. I think Bitcoin, blockchain, crypto is exactly that disruption.
Web3 is exactly that disruption. If you get in on board now, I think the next 15-20 years is really going to be bright. So those who are listening, if you are unaware of these things, you know, try to educate yourself.
Trust me, you are definitely missing out on a very big disruption opportunity that can be instrumental in future. Absolutely. You couldn’t have put it better.
Thank you once again, Sanghita, for making the time to speak to us today. This has been a lovely conversation. Thank you, Tarusha.
Thank you.