Vauld Review – Retail Crypto Banking and Investing Platform from India

• How reliable is Vauld crypto platform?
• Should Indians be using Vauld lending and borrowing service?
• What are the pros and cons of Vauld exchange?

In this detailed Vauld review, you will get answers to your questions and learn some juicy details about this not-so-new Indian retail crypto banking and investment service.

In the past, I have seen the downfall and growth of Indian crypto exchanges. While few exchanges shut down due to regulatory uncertainty, new players like Vauld and CoinSwitch Kuber emerged following a possibility of positive regulations.

CoinSwitch Kuber seems to be ideal for retail investors looking for basic features. Vauld exchange is a better choice for its offerings and international standard UI and UX. In fact, I would not be surprised if Vauld becomes a popular name in the crypto industry in the years to come.

Vauld offers features like crypto lending and borrowing, wallet, Buy the dip AIP (for investment), basic and advanced trading features. With multiple features and services, it is poised to grab one of the top 3 positions on the Indian crypto exchange leaderboard.

For anyone looking to start with crypto investing in India in 2021-22, Vauld should be one of the top choices. However, they do not share the market size of its likes WazirX and CoinDCX that are currently leading the pack. It also may be a deal breaker for many pro users. They source their liquidity from Binance. Even though Vauld is a fairly new Indian crypto exchange, you will have no issues with slippage.

Before dwelling deep into this review of Vauld, let’s learn about the background of the company and the funding they have received. When a crypto project is funded by notable VCs and backers, they usually deliver what they promise. Moreover, it instigates confidence and trust, which is not so common in the crypto markets.

What is Vauld?

Vauld is primarily a crypto lending and borrowing platform, which also offers investment features for retail users around the world. They also have a crypto exchange, where liquidity is outsourced from Binance that you can use to trade cryptos with the least trading fees.

The platform offers many innovative investment products, which help you invest in the market automatically while taking advantage of the high volatility of the crypto markets. If you have ever used Nexo or Celsius for crypto lending and borrowing, you will better understand Vauld. The only difference here is that they offer better interest rates on your crypto holdings.

Create an account on Vauld (Use Referral code: CoinSutra)

Vauld Funding & History of Vauld

Vauld was earlier known as Bank of Hodlers (BoH). Unlike similar platforms, they do not have a token. Vauld was launched in the last quarter of 2018. It was only in 2019 that the crypto bank came up with various features like lending and borrowing (P2P & Centralized Pool), major website revamps, instant token swap, enterprise API for wallets, Fiat rails in INR, and instant BUY & SELL in INR.

It was in 2020 when Bank of Hodlers (BoH) renamed it to Vauld, which is primarily a crypto lending and borrowing platform that serves users from all parts of the world. The company is headquartered in Singapore and has two Indian founders.

Vauld Founders

• Darshan Bathija – Co-founder and CEO
• Sanju Kurian – CTO

Funding So Far

• Vauld raised $2 million in funds from Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, and CMT digital among others
• Vauld raises $25 million in series A funding led by Peter Thiel’s fund

Vauld Review – Why Should You Use Vauld?

In this section, you will learn about the features of Vauld that made it worthy of a review on CoinSutra. For 5+ years, we have been helping projects like Vauld to get exposure to a broader crypto community and helping CoinSutra users (SutraPunks) to find such innovative and useful crypto projects.

With that, let’s have a look at the features of Vauld.

1. Earn Interest on Crypto

Vauld has earlier been featured on our guide ‘earn interest on Bitcoin’ but this is the first feature you must note. When you add coins to your Vauld crypto wallet, you automatically start earning interest on your supported crypto holdings.

The below image summarises the crypto interest account features:

This is a great opportunity for Indians to take advantage of the offering and earn up to 12.68% on their INR. For this, you need to swap INR with USDT and put those USDTs into the Vauld fixed deposit account.

Note: The savings rate offered by Vauld is higher than any Indian bank or their fixed deposit scheme.

2. Borrow Funds Against Crypto

If you ever need funds but don’t want to liquidate your crypto holdings, you can use the borrow feature of Vauld to borrow funds against your crypto holding. It is also a smart way to save yourself from tax liability as you are not buying or selling crypto rather using it as collateral to borrow funds. You can explore relevant tax benefits with your financial consultant or chartered accountant.

Read: How are crypto loans taxed

3. Crypto Trading Platform

To make the life of its customer easier, Vauld also offers instant crypto swap and pro trading terminal for pro-traders. Being a market maker on Binance, they get the lowest rate possible and pass these low fees to end-users like us. Through Vauld, we can get the trading fees in India as low as 0.1%.

You can also swap one crypto with another by using their Instant Swap feature. You can also buy any crypto using INR on Vauld.

4. AIP – Automatic Investment Plan

A review of Vauld would be incomplete without discussing their AIP scheme. AIP stands for Automatic Investment Plan. This helps you accumulate your favorite token at every dip. There are pre-defined baskets that you can invest in by using AIP. You can also customize or set your basket as you do in Smallcase.

Watch the below video to learn more about the AIP feature of Vauld.

Vauld: Pros and Cons

My Experience of Using Vauld

I first got to know about Vauld from CoinSutra readers (SutraPunks) and Vauld’s aggressive advertising. They have been positioning themselves as a crypto lending and borrowing platform that also offers an investment option. I think it took only 20-30 minutes for me to fall in love with the swift interface of Vauld. What surprised me most was the frictionless onboarding process.

Within 10 minutes, I was done with their Instant KYC and received the bank account details for depositing INR. The web interface and mobile app is flawless work of art. Initially, I was skeptical about using their high-paying USDT stable account but then I learned that existing platforms like Nexo and Celsius also offer similar interest rates.

However, having something from India which is backed up by international VCs makes me quite comfortable working with them. Since I have a few questions about the insurance of funds, I have invited Darshan (co-founder) for a talk show (CoinSutra specials). I look forward to bringing more clarity on it in the coming days on how they offer such high interest rates and insurance and security of funds that are lent via Vauld.

As an end-user, I’m excited to discover Vauld and share it with you and other CoinSutra users.

Final Thoughts on Vauld

As a retail crypto banking and investment platform, Vauld is one of its kind from India. People who have experience using Nexo or Celsius will not find any issue understanding Vauld. The user interface is simple and easy to use even for new users.

Even though the platform is available for all countries, it is Indians who are at an advantage with Vauld as a service. Earning over 12% annually (compounding weekly) on your cash is something I have been waiting for long and Vauld comes out as a solution to this problem.

I still would like to see Vauld building tax reporting tools or partnering with crypto tax software for easy accounting, which would make life easier for many investors like us. In fact, a service like Vauld is what India needs to understand the power of crypto investing and savings account. Once the regulatory norms are in place, I believe Vauld would grow leaps and bounds.

For now, it is safe to say that Vauld is one of the best crypto banking services in India. Every Indian crypto user should use or keep it on their watchlist. As they add more tokens to their platform, I would not be surprised if they become a go-to crypto exchange for Indian users.

Create an Instant account on Vauld (Referral code: CoinSutra)