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Kumar Gaurav (born 16 March 1990) is an Indian computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is best known as the developer of the peer-to-peer money transfer platform that later evolved into "neobank" Cashaa.
Early life
Kumar was born on March 16, 1990, in the Nalanda district of Bihar, India.
In 2012, he graduated from Amity University with a degree in computer science, and In 2015, he received a Master's degree in engineering from Polytechnic University of Milan.
Career
In 2014, he founded an Indian IT company that became the Auxesis Group.
In 2017, Kumar published a white paper to create a banking and payment platform Cashaa for the crypto industry. After that he raised $33 million in November 2017.
In April 2018, the Reserve Bank of India, through a circular, banned banks from providing cryptocurrency exchange services. As a result of this ban, several cryptocurrency companies were forced to shut down their operations. Kumar announced a non-profit initiative to educate Indian citizens about the emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency sectors, which then received support from the government. In 2020, the Supreme Court of India lifted the ban and invited central companies to partner with cryptocurrency companies. In 2020, Kumar opened a cryptocurrency neobank in India, however due to regulatory issues and following Coinbase's exit from India, it stopped providing banking services in India in April 2022.
On July 11, 2020, CertiK Skynet, a blockchain security technology company founded by computer science professors from Yale and Columbia Universities and created to validate the security and correctness of smart contracts and blockchain protocols, detected anomalous transactions associated with Cashaa bitcoin wallets on blocks 638606 and 638692. CertiK security researchers launched an investigation to look into the attack. Researchers reported that there may have been two internal operational errors or the victim's computer may have been compromised by a malicious backdoor program.
In September 2020, Kumar raised $5 million from Dubai-based investment fund to expand into the Indian market and fund the user's losses from the July 2020 hack.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kumar took patronage of 5,000 families to send them food and essentials through his company Cashaa's infrastructure in India. He also reached out to other cryptocurrency companies with the hashtag #CryptoAgainstCovid to support underprivileged families.
In 2022, according to Bloomberg, he denied a loan to Luna Foundation.