India blockchain roadmap : Vanvas on the cards?

Hey there blockchainers! I know this is quite a well..energetic time if I must say. Mostly owing to two contradictory developments taking place at the same time. While the world is welcoming bitcoin with open arms as crypto wallets reach 100 million individuals, Indian government seems to be hell bent on stopping things that work perfectly. The least expected was a better researched decision on their ends specially during the whole pandemic.

Thinking about today’s times, this post is about my mann ki baat, since I spent the better part of this new year understanding and relating to the regulators mindset: “WE FEAR WHAT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND AND CAN’T CONTROL.”

I believe there is a certain degree of ignorance combined with resistance to change that is preventing our regulators from letting the society transform itself into a better version. Anyway, while we all put efforts together to broaden the mindset of the government officials, we have to ensure that credible innovators and their efforts don’t go in vain. To ensure that, we have tweaked a bit of our existing strategy which I shall share more a little further in this article. In no way are we going to turn our backs on the Indian ecosystem, so we shall continue to educate and inform more people about the benefits of blockchain and all its use cases, especially the one of cryptocurrencies. Having said that, we have to create a path for early adopters to make good on their timing, efforts and sheer brilliance of taking steps to make good on this phenomenal opportunity.

So, here we go detailing the directional tweaks for this year’s work at our end.

Focus 1 :

Picking up from our first two cohorts of blockchain bootcamp (100 Days of Code), this year we are expanding the focus of our cohorts from blockchain based platform extensions to DeFi, NFTs, social tokens and largely, social use-cases. More importantly, we shall focus on building out stable coin driven ecosystems aligning with our governments direction of virtual Rupee. Last year, we catered to 46 developers, this time we will focus on 150 such participants.

A major focus of the cohort is to help participants set themselves on a path to launch to a global audience, especially if their products utilise cryptocurrencies in any major way. To help us here, we have partners in Zilliqa and Tim Draper’s entrepreneurship school at Draper university that shall help winners of the cohort with next steps in their international journey.

With only 10 spots left in the cohort, we are excited to get started with this community based collaborative software development exercise. Interested ones can show interest here.

Focus 2 :

With the government taking a new direction, we envisage a considerable need for helping credible crypto products move to friendlier jurisdictions, if and when crypto ban is imposed again by the government. While we persist our efforts on helping the officials understand our perspective, we will dedicatedly help Indian teams with this move because in no way we can afford to let their efforts squander. Hence, we shall look at making the move as a group, more affordable and smooth by trying to understand the nuances of establishing ourselves in a new environment.

We will come back but let’s take this chapter to a new city together as a collective. If you are interested in moving your business to Switzerland, Singapore, Estonia or any other country, please fill in the form here and we shall get in touch with you to brainstorm and figure the next steps together.

We will put efforts to involve everyone from our community irrespective of the jurisdiction. This is a temporary move and we intend to bring back everyone when the time is right and conditions are favorable.

Focus 3 :

We know that it is not feasible for all individuals to uproot themselves. To prevent as many of such individuals from closing shops without a return on their investment, we are going to assist them in merger and acquisition deals with relevant companies domiciled outside. The interested Indian teams can share information through this form and members from our teams shall take conversations separately.

As the oldest and most active ecosystem catalyst in India working for the blockchain industry, we shall continue towards our endeavor of fostering innovation and making Indian innovations more relevant in the global context. As i say, ‘if it’s not made in India, it can still be made by India’. The upside you ask? This is an opportunity to preempt our global launch.

“Success is the child of audacity!” Let’s go India, towards a borderless world!