Unocoin was founded in 2013 by a small group of Bitcoin enthusiasts. The company started as a platform to buy, sell, send and receive bitcoins in India. It later on expanded to include services like mobile phone recharge service (airtime) through bitcoins, and also developed a unique Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) to help the users to buy bitcoins by averaging out the cost; and are now the largest Bitcoin-related company in the country.
Unocoin offers two main types of accounts to the users: Individual account and Merchant account. The individual account lets people trade bitcoin against INR. They can also choose to use the Systematic Investment Plan to buy small chunks of bitcoin in regular intervals to increase bitcoin holdings. This plan can be set for daily, weekly or monthly investments.
The merchant account, on the other hand, allows merchants to accept bitcoin payments from their customers. The merchant account offers both online and PoS payment options. The PoS solution can be used in tandem with Unocoin PoS mobile application.
The fee of only 1% is charged by the company to buy and sell bitcoins. The fee further drops down to 0.7% if that particular account shows a significant transaction volume. Though, service tax of 14.50% is charged on the transaction fee as it is levied by the government.
Unocoin also does not charge the users to store bitcoins in the wallet or even on receiving bitcoins on the Unocoin wallet. The network fee incurred by Unocoin on sending Bitcoin to an external bitcoin address is 0.0002, but there is no fee on sending bitcoins to an email-id or another Unocoin user.
Moreover, Unocoin offers the availability to create offline paper wallets. This includes a public and private key pair that can be printed to be stored safely. The addresses are generated using the client side javascript, meaning their servers would be unaware of the address that the browser generates for the customer.
Finally, as a measure against the Bitcoin volatility, the company even lets users choose between storing their Bitcoin or instantly sell it for cash.