June 10, 2026
Organisation Spotlight: India’s Bitcoin Bharat
In 2024, Karan Gill came to the realisation that it was time to abandon crypto and focus exclusively on Bitcoin.
He’d become disillusioned after spending a year and a half in the broader crypto space, as he felt that he’d largely just been spinning his wheels — apart from his investment in and involvement with Bitcoin, that is.
When he came to and decided to refine his focus, he also realized that there was a stark lack of Bitcoin-only companies and initiatives in his home country.
“In India, there are only three or four native Bitcoin-only companies,” Gill told me in an interview.
He also noted that most Indians are struggling to differentiate between bitcoin and crypto.
Karan Gill in 2025 | Photo courtesy of Gill’s X feed
In response, he and a co-founder, Aditya Ranjan, founded an organisation in August 2024 that was “started from their own pain and frustration” regarding the lack of Bitcoin-only entities in India, according to Gill.
That organization is Bitcoin Bharat. (“Bharat” is the Sanskrit/Hindi name for India. It’s what India was called before the British colonised it.)
Bitcoin Bharat is the umbrella organisation for four different initiatives:
Bitcoin India Tour: a program through which Bitcoin Bharat organises and hosts in-person meetups all over India.
Bitcoin White: a consultation firm that offers bitcoin investment guidance to Indian corporations.
Bitcoin Creators Contest: an initiative that rewards Bitcoin content creators with hardware wallets or sats for their content.
The Bitcoin Bharat Conference: an event that the Bitcoin Bharat team believes will be India’s premier Bitcoin conference.
To say that Gill and his team are ambitious is perhaps putting it too lightly.
Gill envisions an India on a hard-money standard, and he’s seemingly doing everything in his power to bring that vision to fruition.
Establishing Bitcoin Bharat
Before starting Bitcoin Bharat, Gill had launched SwapSo, an app that lets users trade their Indian rupees for Bitcoin (as well as gold and U.S. dollars). Gill refers to SwapSo as “the Strike of India.”
Ranjan worked with Gill at SwapSo and the two of them quickly realised that, for the app to gain traction, they would need to educate their fellow countrypeople about why Bitcoin matters, especially since most were still conflating it with the broader assortment of crypto assets.
“Most people in India still look at crypto like a get-rich-overnight scheme,” said Gill, who also shared that most have been burned as a result of thinking this way.
“They get scammed by scammers,” added Gill. “Because of this, we realised we had to do something about education.”
And so the Bitcoin India Tour, the first initiative of what would become Bitcoin Bharat, was born.
Gill and Ranjan planned to organise meetups across India as the foundation for their educational efforts.
The thinking behind this effort was, “if we go in person and teach them about Bitcoin, they will be more convinced compared to if we do it online or if we just published a blog,” explained Gill.
A Bitcoin India Tour stop in Hyderabad. | Photo credit: Bitcoin Bharat
The tour began in January 2025. The Bitcoin India Tour team planned to host 30 events within four months.
Each event featured members of Gill and his co-founders’ network of prominent Bitcoin enthusiasts in India.
“We didn’t go to each of the events ourselves, mostly just the ones close to where we live,” shared Gill, who noted that he lives in Mumbai while Ranjan lives in Delhi. “We handled the operations, coordinated with organisers, and sent the Bitcoiners we knew who were closest to each event to speak about Bitcoin.”
Aditya Ranjan speaking at a Bitcoin India Tour event | Photo courtesy of Aditya Ranjan’s LinkedIn account
With a budget of only US$200 per event, Gill and his team came quite close to their goal, hosting 26 events by April 2025. In the second phase of the tour, the Bitcoin Bharat team put on another 50 events in just over 30 cities, bringing the total number of Bitcoin India Tour events for 2025 to 76.
The content for each event was standardised but included some wiggle room for the specialised knowledge of each of the presenters to shine through.
The core of the message, though, was an overview of what money is and why Bitcoin is important to Indians.
Why Bitcoin Matters for India
The Bitcoin Bharat team focuses heavily on teaching people about Bitcoin from a financial angle.
“We explain why they should invest in bitcoin and how the Indian rupee supply continues to increase over time, which is causing them to lose purchasing power,” explained Gill.
“Reported inflation in India is about 8%, but the actual rate of inflation is likely much higher,” he added.
“From 2019 to 2023 — in just four years — the Indian government increased the money supply by fifty percent.”
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data, the percentage growth in the Indian rupee supply in the time frame that Gill mentioned is even higher — it’s 58%.
OECD data for Indian rupee supply growth presented via a U.S. Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) graph.
Because Indians are feeling the pain of inflation and because Indians have a history of holding gold, a hard asset, to preserve their wealth, Gill believes that they will come around to bitcoin, the hardest asset the world has ever seen.
“Indian households hold more gold than any government,” said Gill. “So, I believe they’ll understand bitcoin as a hard asset. More and more are coming to see it this way.”
What Indians Like About Fedi
Not all Indians who come to understand bitcoin see it as just an investment or “digital gold,” though.
Some see it as a medium of exchange, and tools like SwapSo, which offers a Lightning Network wallet via the Breez SDK, and 256D, which offers Lightning-to-UPI payments, make it easier to use it as such.
Gill also noted that he believes the feature of Fedi that Indians appreciate most is the ability to easily send bitcoin to one another within a private chat in the app.
“Indians use Telegram when they want to send private messages, and other apps for payments,” explained Gill. “But, with Fedi, they can message privately and send bitcoin from the same place.”
Facilitators and educators on the Bitcoin India Tour walk attendees through how they can utilise Fedi in such a way.
Incentivizing Bitcoin Content Creators
In their efforts to educate Indians about Bitcoin, Gill and Ranjan have learned that they don’t have to do all of the heavy lifting themselves.
Not only do they utilise their nationwide network of Bitcoin enthusiasts for the Bitcoin India Tour, but they now incentivise Bitcoin content creators to create high-quality Bitcoin content.
They started the Bitcoin Creators Contest last year when they realised they had some unspent funds from the Bitcoin India Tour, as well as some extra hardware wallets from one of their sponsors.
“We had some extra sponsorship money and some Ledger hardware devices that we could give out as gifts,” said Gill. “We used that money to incentivise people on a per-reel basis. Let's say someone is creating a Bitcoin reel or a meme, they can put that on our portal and based on what they created and how much engagement they get, they get points. We have a leaderboard and top performers get rewards like Ledger devices, some sats, or some swag.”
Gill sees the Bitcoin Creators Contest as a means to not only foster greater Bitcoin awareness but to help scale the reach of Bitcoin Bharat.
“I even started creating content about Bitcoin and my reels get about 6,000-8,000 views on average,” said Gill.
“One of my reels went viral and it got about 1 million views,” he added.
“Social media will be important for helping Bitcoin Bharat to go viral.”
What Comes Next for Bitcoin Bharat?
Moving forward, the Bitcoin Bharat team and the community around the organisation continue to do work both offline via the Bitcoin India Tour and online via social media content creation.
According to the Bitcoin Bharat website, the organisation has educated over 13,000 Indians in person with an aim to increase that number to over 100,000 by 2027, according to the Bitcoin Bharat X handle.
A screenshot of the Bitcoin Bharat website.
The organisation is also prepping for its next steps.
“We are planning to get started with Bitcoin White next month,” shared Gill. “We want to go to corporate entities, to companies that have major purchasing power, and help them to understand bitcoin from an investment perspective.”
What is more, Gill and Ranjan are looking to launch the Bitcoin Bharat Conference in 2027.
Gill pointed out, though, that the Bitcoin Bharat team may help the team that’s organising BitMela, a Bitcoin festival in Jaipur this October.
Thanks in part to Gill and Ranjan’s various Bitcoin initiatives, Bitcoin has become less taboo in India, which is something that has Gill feeling optimistic as he and his team continue in their seemingly non-stop efforts to onboard their fellow citizens.
“Bitcoin is getting normalised for people,” said Gill. “People might have a wrong perception of it because of half-knowledge or lack of knowledge, but everybody has at least heard the word ‘Bitcoin.’ They at least know that Bitcoin exists, which makes our work a little bit easier going forward.”
