Mohit Kalra, 27, is the CEO of Coinsecure, India’s first virtual currency exchange to provide real-time transactions, and one of the greatest firms in the country in terms of sales volume. He’s a class X dropout and hails from a business family.  Initially, he had an interest in music and tech. He undertook a music production course in Bengaluru and has produced several music tracks.

In 2010, Kalra got an opportunity to attend a conference in Singapore where he got an opportunity to learn about the virtual currency investment. For the next three years, Kalra devoted himself on mining bitcoins and has since become the largest bitcoin miner across India.

Kalra revealed that he carried out most of his mining through use of graphics cards while others were mining from their laptops. By the time his friends switched to graphics cards, Kalra was already mining on the Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) chips that gave him more computing power needed to charge up the mining process.

In 2011, Kalra traveled to China where he had contacts with world leaders in bitcoin mining and managed to fly back with 20 miners’ worth of ASIC chips. According to Kalra, one board of ASIC chips can mine up to 200 graphics cards. Kalra recalls that when he started mining, bitcoin was costing roughly a dollar each but he patiently waited for the prices to go up and eventually they did.

The bitcoin prices drastically increased from $100 to $600 but Kalra got worried about the crash. He sold most of his bitcoin assets but the prices continued to go up hitting $8,000 mark this month in the region. However, Kalra stated that the journey has been tough with extremely low prices offered in India since there was no proper exchange in the country where investors could place an order to buy or sell the coins. Hence he started to build the Coinsecure in 2014, which has become the largest bitcoin exchange in India.

According to Kalra, the Indian government is reluctant to regulate the cryptocurrencies due to lack of knowledge and ignorance of the importance of the industry.