2008Lehman goes, and Bitcoin gets its reason. Goyal traces the inception of Bitcoin to the borrowed money that crashed the big banks, the governments that bailed them out and the taxpayers who paid, with American pensions wiped out and housing gone. India came through it lightly, he says, on a young and well protected financial system.
2010Fruit and vegetables, no venture capital. His first company sold produce online two years before BigBasket, started in his second year of engineering, in a country where he knew of no VCs at all.
2012He finishes at IIT Bombay and first hears of Bitcoin. It reached him on a price spike, and again on the next one in 2014, neither time as anything but a number going up. Next came hyper-casual games, four or five million users, no funding and no full-time staff.
2016-17Bangalore, and friends who own the thing. He asks them what it actually is, gets told it is a permissionless currency, and reads Satoshi's white paper alongside Sapiens: one had built trust, the other explained that humans win by coordinating, and he decided coordination was what he had been doing all along.
Late 2017Mudrex, with three friends from college. If the way to spread the idea was to get people invested in it, the product was a platform telling them which currencies to buy and when. He had read every white paper of that era, including the ones now closed down.
2019Into Y Combinator. He believes it was the first Indian crypto company accepted there.
Late 2020Three bear years, then the audit. Progress was flat until the market turned after COVID and the funding arrived, and by the end of the year he had decided he was running a centralised company where everyone deposited their money. Mesh Finance started as a telegram group and a blog post rather than a product. DeFi had about 100,000 users then; he puts it at perhaps five million now.
TodayAn exchange with nobody on the payroll. The first yield product offered three buttons, low, medium and high risk, and died on Ethereum fees, because paying $10 to deposit $100 makes the low-risk tier pointless; the search for a layer two ended on StarkNet, where they had to build the exchange first. JediSwap now has 100,000 people in Discord, five to ten thousand who ever discuss it, about 500 who put in an hour or five a month, and not one employee.
