Mumbai-based blockchain startup Nuo Bank has raised $250,000 ( ~ ₹1.6 crore) in a seed funding from payment gateway firm PayU India’s chief executive officer Amrish Rau and managing director Jitendra Gupta, reported Economics Times.

Founded, this year only, by Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma, Nuo Bank claims to be India first cryptobanking platform. Its also a virtual bank will help users store savings in crypto format on a blockchain, and get them virtual share in the revenue of the bank.

The startup will offer about 20 per cent of its 1 billion tokens, called Nuo Coins, to customers, the value of which will be connected to smart contracts. These tokens can be sold on exchanges used within the Nuo Bank ecosystem for transactions.

The platform plans to generate revenue from transaction fees or merchant discount rate (MDR) on payments of its products as well as a share of the premium from its peer-to-peer lending business.

The app’s peer-to-peer lending facility will allow users to pledge Ethereum-based tokens and borrow money from a lender, who will be another customer of the bank.

Using Nuo app, users can store all their cryptocurrencies at one place, pay for their coffee at Starbucks with a Nuo Card or make near instant peer to peer transfers over Nuo.Network. It also enables users to avail global financial products and services at one place via Nuo Play.

Nuo Bank platform estimates crypto economy to be $3 trillion by 2022. According to a media outlet, the startup plans to operate in 13 emerging markets. The startup is giving 100 tokens each to the first 10000 users. It claims to have 5,000 customers in less than two days of launch.

Notably, both the investors duo of Nuo's this round of funding -- Amrish & Jitendra -- were previously co-founders of Citrus Pay, a consumer internet firm acquired by PayU in 2016. The duo had invested $250,000 in Bengaluru-based fintech startup Open, in July 2017

Earlier this month, a Mumbai-based blockchain startup Aetlo Tech got acquired by UK-based banking and financial services company Page Solutions, within a year of its launch.

Coming back to Cryptobanking, Estonia-based Crypterium is also an ambitious startup that aims to develop an open platform digital cryptobank, capable of providing a user-friendly, global banking experience using the power of blockchain technology. The north-European startup claims to be the worlds largest initial coin offering (ICO) based on the number buyers with individuals from 153 different countries participating in the token offer.

To recall, last September Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB), a Sweden-based bank has joined hands with Nasdaq to test a new fund trading platform based on blockchain technology.

Even though as cryptocurrency have a notion of having an uncertain future, entrepreneurs across the globe are using the technology to innovate, especially around financial services.

Last year in India, to everyone's surprise a dental clinic in Pune started accepting cryptocurrency Called ‘Dentacoin’ from its customers, which was first in India.

Last month, a report by the Indian branch of the global job site Indeed said that despite regulatory uncertainty and government’s warning over cryptocurrencies, the number of job postings related to cryptocurrency and blockchain has increased by 290%, along with its job searches containing crypto related keywords which have risen by 52%.

To recall, the acting secretary of the department of economic affairs stated that the Indian government will have a more concrete set of crypto regulations in place by the end of March, which is however still awaited due to the very fact that ministers are giving regional elections more priority than every thing else. In the same month, India’s income tax department has issued 100,000 tax notices to cryptocurrency investors in the country, in sign of a government crackdown on the use of the cryptocurrencies.

Prior to that, nationwide survey in India has revealed that in last 17 months of period, people in the country have invested in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies worth whopping US $3.5 billion.
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