Choices made as a young person are typically influenced by family and in Nikhil Joshi’s case it was his two elder brothers who were more than a decade older. ‘Go for a sensible job,’ they said. ‘Don’t rely on languages,’ which propelled him into a job with an accountancy firm. Along the way he studied French, having dropped German to study ‘sensible’ maths. Despite this serious approach to his career, he did manage to spend a year studying in Paris drinking coffee and smoking Gitanes.
While accountancy was not a choice for him, the qualifications and letters after his name allowed him to get into banking which was much more up his street. To his good fortune, he ended up in the regulatory capital space which was a hot topic in banking.
“There was a lot of correlation between share price and common Equity Tier 1 and I was bang in the middle of that. My personal capital was rising.”
Joshi was transferred to Singapore in 2013 but the capital pump was running out of steam. In the US and London, interest waned, but in Asia still wanted to add bells and whistles to vanilla bonds. Joshi decided he was bored and began volunteering for new endeavors.
“I looked back over my career and saw it as a series of accidental jumps. So I started volunteering – often without knowing the first thing about the new project but I still volunteered and that is how blockchain came into my life.”
Joshi quit the investment banking life and joined a startup in blockchain and finance, or rather trade finance in particular. While he enjoyed blockchain technology, he quickly realized that trade finance was not for him.
“Also, I was more interested in the public side of blockchain in general and the functionality offered by the technology. That was the first part that excited me, the second was the total rejuvenation I felt in the space. While in institutional banking there was a lot of ‘not rocking’ the boat, but in blockchain there was such freedom.
“People spoke about ‘breaking the banks’ and sat up late talking about the philosophical ideas behind cryptocurrencies – right up to the more mundane aspect of using the technology to get settlements to work instantaneously. I was invigorated.”
Joshi read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous (2018) and the penny well and truly dropped.
“Even as an ex-banker, I was astonished that people did not understand money. Very few people questioned financial systems until Bitcoin. I read that book and all of a sudden, I was down the rabbit hole. I was energized over smart contracts and programmable language. I could see how for example real estate could be financed using fractionalization, that someone with only $10 could get involved.”
It wasn’t just the investment of tiny sums but the ability to accrue wealth, this was a game changer for Joshi.
Shortly afterwards he met Ken Kodama, CEO of EMURGO, which focuses on the commercial adoption in the Cardano blockchain. Given his own commercial background, this made total sense to Joshi.
“Suddenly my expertise and interests were aligned – possibly for the first time in my career. I really get that EMURGO embraces all commercial opportunities. We are very early in this space and the danger might have been to put all our eggs in one basket which would have been a mistake.
“We know the general direction of travel, but we don’t know where we are going to land. We look at projects in this space and we might add education, marketing or help with their market development. It’s a complimentary position.”
EMURGO has also now built a tokenization platform and had intended, before continued regulatory uncertainty in the US, to launch their first fiat-backed stable coin for Cardano.
“We’ve paused that for the moment, until the regulatory conditions are clarified or we might even consider moving jurisdiction.”
It is hard to know where blockchain will land. Joshi compares it to the early internet. “Imagine,” he says, “trying to explain the internet to someone in the early 70s, or to try and explain what is now normal – imagine trying to tell someone below the age of 20 that smartphones did not exist before.”
For Joshi, blockchain is technology and what it is used for will determine the outcomes.
“Consider a plank of wood. For someone that is a tool, for another, something to bang nails into – the use determines the outcome. Same with blockchain – I think people are too quick to say blockchain equals DeFi or NFTs. Same as the technology that underpins the internet, no one cares what it is, as long as you can book flights or stream music.”
This broad approach, and EMURGO’s broad adoption of multiple projects sits well with Joshi. He has pivoted into blockchain – as an active choice – and is very much enjoying the ride. The bear market has definitely impacted on delivery but the Cardano community has been building in earnest.
Asking to bet on any one project, Joshi is reluctant to single out one. “There are some 1300 projects in development and I can’t wait to see them come to fruition in the upcoming bull market. It’s new and nascent but the blockchain world is starting to mature and I am delighted to be here.”
Joshi has chosen his pathway. While everything he worked at has led him to this point, he is not for turning now. And he can’t wait for the bull market to kick everything off, whether or not he takes up smoking Gitanes again is another matter altogether.
