Sarmad Nazki, Chief Financial Officer of crypto unicorn CoinSwitch Kuber, Sharan Nair, Chief Business Officer and Krishna Hegde, Head of New Initiatives, have resigned from the company, the firm confirmed in a statement today. The trio will leave the firm on August 5 and look for a new Web3 venture of their own.
A source familiar with the matter said the new venture is still in the early stages of development, and the three have not worked out details at the moment.
Ashish Singhal, Co-Founder and CEO of CoinSwitch, confirmed in a statement, “After many years of building CoinSwitch, my colleagues and good friends Sharan Nair, Sarmad Nazki and Krishna Hegde have decided to start in the Web3 space. has done.”
The company had last month appointed Ramesh Bafna as its new CFO. Bafna is an 18-year-old industry veteran who has previously worked in companies like Myntra and Flipkart. Rishab Dev, who has worked with Hegde at the firm as Vice President of New Initiatives, will lead the new vertical. Last year, CoinSwitch said it would expand into traditional investment products.
“We are very passionate about crypto and we believe it is here to stay. We will continue to seek guidance from the CoinSwitch team, which has been my home ground for more than four years,” Nair said in a statement. “
CoinSwitch Kuber became a crypto unicorn in October last year, after raising $260 million from US-based venture capital firm Andreesson Horowitz (a16z) and Coinbase Ventures. At the time, the company was valued at $1.9 billion and was the second crypto unicorn in India after competitor CoinDCX.
The resignations of three top executives also come at a time when the crypto market is experiencing an extended bear phase. Amid a sharp drop in cryptocurrency prices and the Indian government imposing new taxes on Virtual Digital Assets (VDA), crypto platforms such as CoinSwitch are experiencing depressed trading volumes.
According to data from Credit Rating for Exchange Blockchains and Coin Offerings (CREBACO), a crypto research firm, daily trading volumes on WazirX and CoinDCX, two of the top crypto exchanges in India, fell by 82% and 90% respectively. end of June. CoinSwitch is also considering reducing trading volumes.
Three executives aren’t the first to pull out of crypto exchanges to see the larger Web3 space. In February, WazirX founder Nishkal Shetty joined hands with blockchain architect Omar Syed to launch a new venture called Shardem.