India won't ban Bitcoin. But will India embrace crypto? Perhaps you can help a billion people meme their way towards greater economic freedom.

Few understand the stakes, but the world’s largest democracy stands at the most important economic crossroads in its history since the fateful 1991 decision to liberalize the economy and unleash what is becoming Internet India.

Since that moment, India’s GDP has grown >10X from $270B in 1991 to $2.9T in 2019. It’s now #3 on the global tech unicorn list after the US and China, and it’s shipped impressive things in both the public and private sector like ISRO (space), Reliance Jio (4G LTE), Aadhar (identity), UPI (payments), and the full suite of IndiaStack APIs that power India's economic backplane. Over this period, the internet and economic liberalization have been the twin engines of reliable growth for India.

Now, however, there are dark clouds on the horizon. COVID threw a wrench in the works and cut India's GDP by >7%. For India to achieve its pre-pandemic goal of a $5T economy by 2025, it’s going to need a big swing. Something that could be deployed quickly, and go vertical even more quickly. Something on the scale of Reliance Jio or Aadhaar, both of which grew to hundreds of millions of people in a few years. A true rabbit out of the hat.

That’s what adding crypto to IndiaStack could do. Take a look at this series of articles that make the case for why India should embrace crypto rather than restrict it, and then look at these graphs:

The growth of defi as per defipulse.com. And the growth of the cryptoeconomy as per coinmarketcap.com.

Have you ever seen something so big growing so fast? Compare to the big five tech companies over the same period. These giants, often thought of as fast-growing global bellwethers, look like they are asymptoting out relative to the cryptoeconomy over the same time frame:

And, unless they embrace crypto, they might well be.

The smartest people in tech get this and have begun integrating crypto. That’s why Zuck is pursuing Diem, Musk is buying Bitcoin, and Jack is doing BlueSky. That’s why Bitcoin is now in every major fintech app from Square to Robinhood, why the CEO of Shopify is trying out Ethereum, and why Andreessen Horowitz and USV made early bets on crypto and Coinbase – bets that just paid off with one of the largest tech listings since Facebook.

That’s the opportunity. Embracing the multi-trillion dollar crypto-economy is one of the few credible moves that could conceivably get India back on track to $5T by 2025. A trend that could take India from “third world country” to first-class financial center, just as India has already leapfrogged much of the world in payments with UPI, identity with Aadhar, and data with Reliance Jio. A trend that crypto folks around the world and within India itself could help the country embrace.

Here's the problem: crypto can be complicated. We've written several posts on why India should embrace crypto to help people understand the topic, which you can and should use as references, but video is the high bandwidth pathway to the human brain.

So we want to experiment with turning pieces of those posts into short video memes. And that's where you come in. Can you make the India crypto equivalent of this, or something even better?

✅ Task: Earn BTC for video memes

Create fun videos on Indian crypto

The best two video memes will each earn $1000 in BTC, and the next ten best will receive prizes of $100 each. Use the following posts as inspiration, as well as content from around the web, to help develop memes around Indian crypto adoption:

Here are some guidelines:

  • keep it positive and informative
  • critique bad ideas, but don't make personal attacks
  • limit length to 140 seconds

Post your videos on social media, tag @oneseventwonine, and then submit them in the form below!

🏆 Winners: Best Video Memes on Indian Crypto

The Grand Prize Winners:

These two grand prize winners have received $1,000 in BTC for their video memes on Indian crypto!

The Next Ten Best:

The next ten best submissions received $100 in Bitcoin for their video memes on Indian crypto. Check them out!