Unchained Capital (Co-founder & CSO Dhruv Bansal, Columbia College ’05) is a bitcoin-native financial services company. They sell lending, custody, and exchange services delivered with best-in-class security through their innovative and open-source technology. $75mil AUM and $1mil revenue (LTM).
Dhruv Bansal will pitch Unchained in the FIRST annual CVC London Demo “Night” at 2 PM EST on Wednesday, October 21st. Unchained Capital will be one of six teams to pitch.
The all-virtual nature allowed more teams to apply from anywhere and will also allow a larger group of attendees. While we miss the in-person events, we are excited to host all of you that might not have been able to travel to these cities. Remember to RSVP!
Dhruv Bansal is a tech entrepreneur, programmer, and physicist. He started with physics and math back at Columbia College, but in grad school for his PhD in physics, he discovered a love of programming and simulations. As his simulations got bigger, he turned to distributed computer systems to execute them and house their data.
This eventually led to founding his first company. His interests in distributed systems, physics, and entrepreneurship collide in bitcoin -- a new distributed money powered by energy. He couldn't be more excited to be working in this space.
How did you decide to launch Unchained and what’s your ultimate goal?
When we started Unchained, Joe and I already owned bitcoin and were planning to hold it for many years as a long-term speculative investment. We verified there was a lot of bitcoin "sitting around" just like ours.
Most bitcoin services such as exchanges or wallets catered to traders, people buying and selling bitcoin. We wanted to build services for bitcoin holders like us, those planning on preserving and growing their bitcoin holdings securely over the long-term.
Unchained is a bitcoin bank that's focused on these kinds of customers and services, providing superior security and smartly designed financial services in the spirit of bitcoin.
Our ultimate goal is to help bitcoin holders everywhere use multisig custody in a distributed market of financial services.
What makes your methods superior?
Bitcoiners are often faced with an unfortunate choice between keeping their bitcoin safe and making it useful. Security comes from owning the keys to your bitcoin and keeping them in offline cold storage.
Financial services such as buying/selling bitcoin, lending, fixed income, insurance - usually require sending your bitcoin to a trusted third-party custodian, robbing you of control over your funds, one of the essential rights of bitcoin ownership which makes it so unique!
Unchained provides financial services using multisig technology - instead of taking your bitcoin, we collaborate with you to protect it.
Smartly choosing who owns which keys allows us to customize on-chain custody for individual financial products. This is the right and scalable way to deliver bitcoin financial services.
Are there any resources or words of advice you’d share with other founders?
Joe and I believe in being contrarian. If you do what everyone else does, how will you deliver better returns than the average?
We were looking at bitcoin early because bitcoin was so contrary, plodding along despite objections from economists and computer scientists. We became believers in bitcoin and decided to risk not only our money investing in it but our reputations building a company around it.
Soon bitcoin -- or rather "cryptocurrencies" -- became fashionable. Everyone was into them, making fortunes from ICOs, it seemed. Despite much pressure, Joe and I remained contrary, believing that ICOs were fundamentally flawed and possibly illegal ways of financing companies like ours.
As altcoins grew, our team stayed focused on bitcoin, running contrary to the "world computer" investment thesis so prevalent among tech investors. Today we are the only company in our industry focused on bitcoin-native financial services and we are growing quickly with a great brand and very sticky product.
Our contrariness is paying off because we stuck to our vision and weren't buffeted by easy wins or popular delusions.
What city are you all based out of?
We are headquartered in Austin, Texas, but have team members across the US.
Thank you Dhruv! We look forward to hearing you pitch on October 21th. Don’t forget to RSVP!