How Ritesh Kakkad and Atul Khekade Build Trade-Focused Web3 Rails

Most people who have waited days for an international payment to clear know that ‘instant’ money often travels at a walking pace. That slow, uneven reality sits behind the work of Ritesh Kakkad and Atul Khekade, co-founders of the institutional-grade blockchain platform XDC Network. The duo now spends their time rethinking how digital infrastructure may support global trade.

Seeing Friction Up Close

Kakkad and Khekade didn’t begin their careers inside crypto circles. They first worked together on Airnetz, an airline charter company that dropped them into the messier corners of cross-border payments. Flights could be booked in minutes, but the money tied to those flights often crawled through intermediaries, compliance checks, and conflicting banking rules.

The gap between how fast information moved and how slowly capital followed stayed with them. For Khekade, delays in international transfers weren’t only a business inconvenience. They also affected someone close to him in a way that never left his mind.

Running Airnetz also gave the pair an unfiltered look at trade finance more generally. They saw smaller businesses struggle to access working capital, not because the demand was weak, but because paperwork and risk models shut them out. Those experiences shaped how they would later think about blockchain. While many people are interested in speculative tokens, they were drawn to the plumbing beneath trade.

Turning Frustration Into Infrastructure

By 2017, that frustration turned into a design question. If payment rails and trade documentation kept slowing work down, what kind of network could help regulated institutions move value and data with fewer points of friction? Kakkad brought experience in cloud infrastructure and compliance-heavy fintech projects

Khekade brought familiarity with trade finance workflows and the ways banks assess risk. Together, they started shaping what would become XDC Network, a public blockchain aimed at institutional use.

The pair focused on characteristics that large financial players look for: predictable costs, transparent rules, and strong security. XDC Network runs as a Layer-1 blockchain that may support tokenization, settlement, and data-sharing for trade-related use cases. Its architecture prioritizes quick finality, low transaction fees, and an energy profile that sits closer to modern proof-of-stake systems than legacy proof-of-work chains.

Why Trade Finance Drew Their Focus

Trade finance underpins exports, imports, shipping, insurance, and supply chains. Yet much of the paperwork still lives in static formats and siloed systems. Kakkad and Khekade saw that tension early.

Banks carry regulatory responsibilities and must be cautious, while smaller firms often view that caution as distance and delay. Somewhere between those positions is an opportunity for infrastructure built around verifiable data, shared rules, and programmable workflows.

With XDC Network, the founders leaned into use cases that may bring these pieces closer together. Tokenized representations of trade documents, receivables, or other financial instruments could, in theory, move across borders with clearer audit trails.

Smart contracts might help standardize how certain conditions are checked before a payment releases. While this doesn’t remove the need for oversight or local rules, it simply gives institutions more tools to encode those rules into the rails themselves.

From Founders to Patient Backers

Over time, the pair’s role expanded beyond building a single network. Kakkad and Khekade now back founders working on Web3 projects that focus on real-world utility, especially around trade, finance, and digital infrastructure. Instead of approaching that work as detached investors, they come to it as people who have shipped code, dealt with outages, and sat through meetings with regulators.

Their portfolio leans toward companies trying to solve stubborn operational problems: onboarding banks to digital assets in a compliant way, building tooling for tokenized securities, or improving how different platforms talk to each other.

They tend to gravitate toward founders who are comfortable in boardrooms and server rooms alike. Those founders can explain their product to a risk officer one hour and a developer the next. For Kakkad and Khekade, capital is only part of the equation. Introductions and hard-won context are just as important.

Treating Regulation as a Design Constraint

Working across hubs like Singapore, Dubai, London, and New York has given the duo a close-up view of how digital asset rules shift from one jurisdiction to another. Rather than seeing that patchwork as an obstacle, they treat it as a reality any serious project must live with. Regulations move more slowly than code, but they set the boundaries within which new tools may operate.

Kakkad and Khekade spend a large chunk of time in conversations where lawyers, policymakers, and engineers share the same table. They’re interested in how emerging frameworks around digital securities, tokenized real-world assets, and custody requirements translate into actual system design.

That might mean helping a portfolio company think through where to locate a legal entity, or how to structure a pilot so that it aligns with local guidance. In their view, compliant design isn’t a final step added to the finished product. It sits close to the beginning, shaping which ideas are worth chasing at all.

What Their Story Says About Web3’s Next Phase

While many industry leaders are drawn to dramatic price charts, Kakkad and Khekade represent an infrastructure-first path. Their careers track a line from airline logistics to blockchain architecture and supporting other founders. That includes those whose work may never trend on retail forums but could show up inside trade finance. Their primary focus is on whether a bank, asset manager, or logistics provider will still rely on a system years from now.

For anyone watching Web3 from the sidelines, their story offers one view of where the space may be heading. Instead of framing blockchain as a parallel universe, Kakkad and Khekade treat it as a set of tools that might stay underneath existing financial and trade systems.

Those tools could make certain tasks more traceable and less time-consuming. If that vision holds, the most consequential blockchain projects may end up feeling almost invisible, humming away in the background of letters of credit, shipping documents, and compliance checks.

Ultimately, the co-founders pay attention to slow structural problems that restrict growth. That kind of background effort stays out of campaign decks but lingers in process charts and internal debriefs. For the companies that move goods across borders, that shift could change how often they wait on payments and the amount of energy they spend proving what they already believe is true.