Cryptowalasri: How Three Failed UPSC Attempts Led to a Career in Crypto Growth 

Hi, I'm Srikanth Kishan. People call me cryptowalasri. I graduated in aeronautics in India, then went to Delhi to prepare for the civil services exam, UPSC. I didn't clear it, not in three attempts. But in the first year of trying, I sat through an economics lecture that mentioned virtual digital assets, and that's the day cryptocurrency walked into my life and never left.

In short: I failed UPSC three times while teaching myself crypto on the side, small monthly investments and the occasional coin sent to the wrong address. That self-taught habit turned into a community, then a job as a community moderator, then growth hacker, then marketing head, all in two years. From there I moved to KoinX as Head of Growth and Partnerships, closing exchange deals with CoinDCX, Bybit, CoinStash and Digital Surge. After two years there, I joined a fintech startup, Finosauras Tech, as Entrepreneur in Residence, where I've built or shipped a signals app and also alongside a blog-writing tool, two crypto games, a crypto screener called GeckoScreener, a plus-size fashion search site, and a price-alert tool for my wife. I'm now open to a remote growth or EIR role, in crypto specifically, because crypto is the thing that's been with me through every low and high since that lecture.

An economics lecture, not a trading floor

Nobody plans to get into crypto through a UPSC classroom. I was in Delhi, deep into preparing for an exam most people fail more than once, and I did too, three times over. But that first year, an economics lecture mentioned virtual digital assets, and I started following the technology out of curiosity more than ambition.

Every month I put in a small amount. It turned into a real profit over time, so I kept going. I was entirely self-taught: exchange trading first, then decentralized exchanges, a crypto wallet, perpetual trading, staking, all of it learned by doing rather than being taught. That included the expensive lessons. I sent funds to a wrong address at least once, and to a contract address that swallowed them for good. I think of that money as the fee I paid for my own education, because there was no other way to learn it.

By the third year of failing to clear UPSC, crypto wasn't a side interest anymore. It was part of my life. I started teaching friends what I knew, then turned that into a small community, teaching people how to trade, what to trade, and the fundamentals behind it.

A gold-backed token, a 15x night, and a job

Inside that community, I came across a token backed by gold and silver on-chain. The idea fascinated me enough that I explained it to the group and put a small amount of my own money in. A week later, a bug in the exchange sent the price up 15x in a single day. I was calling people at 2.30am telling them to book profits.

That's how I got properly exposed to the project behind the token. There was an opening on their team, I applied, and I got in as a community moderator.

From there, promotions came fast. Community moderator became community head, and as community head I planned campaigns, helped launch a new staking platform, and ran YouTube Live AMAs that worked well. Some campaigns pushed staking volumes into the millions, others into the thousands, but the direction was always up. That performance moved me into a growth hacker role, and after that into marketing head, all inside two years at the same organization.

KoinX: partnerships, cold outreach, and the tools nobody asked for

One of my seniors at Oropocket -CC (Chanchal Chakrachathri) was advising a project called KoinX, which builds crypto tax reports and calculations for the Indian market and Globaly. He brought me into a call where they were brainstorming a portfolio feature, I gave a few suggestions, and that was my first real conversation with KoinX's founder, Punit Agarwal. We met properly at an event in Bangalore, and he offered me the Head of Growth and Partnerships role. I took it.

At KoinX I handled partnerships for the B2C tax-report product, and later picked up B2B responsibilities too, once they added an accounting platform. The full-time core of the job was exchange partnerships, the kind that actually move volume. CoinDCX, one of India's biggest exchanges then and now, was part of that, handled remotely even though the founder already had close connections there. When KoinX expanded globally, I closed a partnership with Bybit, one of the top exchanges worldwide. For the Australian market, I cold-reached the founders and CXOs of CoinStash and Digital Surge myself and closed both. A handful of smaller-volume exchanges came in the same way.

The part I actually enjoyed was building the growth hacks. Some exchanges weren't natively supported on the platform, so I built tools that converted a raw exchange transaction history into KoinX's own report format, simple enough that customer support agents could run it for users instead of engineering. I also built tools to find CXO contact emails and automate outreach that didn't land in spam. Not every experiment worked, but enough of them did.

Entrepreneur in residence, and the side projects that got out of hand

After two years at KoinX, the same senior, CC, who's now my mentor and more than an elder brother, started his own company with a colleague and his childhood friend, Sarthak Joshi. Sarthak and I had worked together at the last two companies as well, and he turned out to be my best friend too. It's a fintech startup called Finosauras Tech Private Limited. I joined as entrepreneur in residence, which in practice meant marketing, a bit of product, customer support, and whatever else needed doing.

We grew the platform past one lakh users, 100,000 people, in six months, mostly on the back of growth campaigns, ads and hacks we kept testing. Somewhere in there I built a PWA called Signal, where live trades discussed on TV showed up on the app in real time, and I handled the UI/UX and user interaction side of it. We got our first revenue with Signals.

The side experiments are the part I'm proudest of, honestly. I built a tool called BlogWriter, which connects to a Claude subscription on my laptop, researches a topic on its own, writes the post, adds relevant YouTube links, generates images, and publishes straight to a client's platform. I made a card game called BitClash(Not released to public), built around nostalgic gameplay but themed entirely around crypto education. I made another game, Humans of Bitcoin, where people test their trading instincts against real historical Bitcoin setups, calling long or short with no real money on the line, just leaderboard points.

Then there's GeckoScreener.com, which I built as a genuinely user-friendly crypto screener. It's picked up over 100 users in its first 45 days, growing organically, helped along by a hack I built to auto-post its screener patterns to Twitter. The blog behind it is written by the same BlogWriter tool. Separately, I noticed a search gap around plus-size clothing in India, people looking for brands that actually fit them, so I built a small site for that too. As of today, 14 September 2026, it's picked up around 4,000 impressions in the last 7 days. Small, but moving the right way. And because my wife trades, I built her a tool that tracks top gainers across different platforms and alerts her when a coin moves by a set percentage, up or down. It's called Antag, and it does exactly that one job.

What I'm looking for now

I'm open to a few different kinds of roles, but growth and entrepreneur in residence are the ones that actually interest me, the kind where I get the freedom to understand a platform and build the small tools that move traffic, retention, or conversion. Crypto specifically, because crypto is the thing that's been with me through every low and high since that economics lecture in Delhi. It's not a category I fell into. It's the one that's been there the whole time.

I'd prefer it remote, and I'd prefer to stay where I am rather than move to a city. The air's better here, and it means I get to spend time with my parents and my kid. That's the setup I'm looking for.