Hard Fork | Talk Show | Season 01 | Episode 06 | Building an Ecosystem for Blockchain in India

Blockchain - The Tribe

Let’s get a little anthropological! It is a known fact that the advent of human civilization accelerated when they started building communities and transacted through known mediums. The communities lived in their own cocoons for a very long time, but once they got in touch with each other, the once disparate communities exploded into a global network. Most collaborated on trust, the others on systems built to protect each other’s interests. Blockchain is a similar story, albeit this time, it worked perfectly even for those who had not established trust between themselves.

Our next episode in the Hard Fork scheme-of-things, wanted to explore the nature of communities and community building in India. Our country has had its own set of crypto fever and crypto-lull periods thus making it difficult for individuals to grow. However, despite the authoritative banking ban, there were people with a Blockchain and crypto (mostly Bitcoin) bent of mind, who started getting together, collaborate together and standing together to build a flourishing network of like-minded individuals with almost similar goals. I have a feeling that Blockchain would not have survived, had Satoshi not galvanized the Cypherpunk community towards the common goal

Why is Ecosystem or communities important?

Whenever we talk about adoption of a new technology like Blockchain into the society or an industry, efforts have to be made with a missionary zeal to build an ecosystem, to evangelize the tech and to create talent. And it all starts with creating a community of believers around it.

I would like to call them people ecosystems. There are many small and big community development initiatives around Crypto and Blockchain in India which have been working over the past few years. And this effort has continued despite the current state of regulatory inaction.

Questions on our mind

We had the following questions in our mind when we were framing the thoughts around this episode:

• How does one go about creating a community or ecosystem of like-minded people?
• How does a community of believers come together to build an ecosystem?
• How challenging is it to build a people based ecosystems?
• What is the difference between Indian and overseas community building?
• How does one go about scaling a community from a small group of people?

The guest

In this episode we meet Akshay Aggarwal, Founder of Blockchained India - one such community building initiative which is working to create an ecosystem for this technology in India and overseas. It is said to be India’s largest community for this space. They started with a closed group of 4 people who had the same vision for Blockchain. This grew from 4 to a whopping 20000 member / follower community across India with a large number of volunteer groups across many cities.

Akshay is a young entrepreneur, a Draper University graduate, a brilliant communicator and fantastic community builder. We talk to him and discuss how building people ecosystems can help in starting up India on Crypto and Blockchain. I drill into him to try and find out how a tribe of Blockchain and Crypto believers can grow from the current few thousands.

His views

Akshay has an anthropological mindset for a software developer. His visions are interspersed with the ideas in the renowned books Tribes by Seth Godin and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. He speaks about the needs for people to get together to find a solution to grave problems humankind is facing. His thoughts takes the route of the concept of ‘Society 3.0’ where the an individual is just not a citizen of a particular nation, but is essentially a global native.

His views are simple - first ideate and share the idea with one like-minded person, showcasing it with many more from time-to-time and on a regular basis, try to find wins for the community members so that the people find usefulness in the group. At the end of it, it is a continuous drive to get like-minded people together with which the community can thrive further.

Hear it more on the Episode.

End Notes

We premiered the 1st episode on Amazon Fire TV on 22nd April 2019 and officially launched the founderINDIA channel on 23rd April. All Hard Fork Episodes will also be simulcast on other platforms including YouTube.

Watch Hard Fork Episode 6 with Akshay Aggarwal on Amazon Fire TV (FounderINDIA channel), YouTube and Facebook.

We would love to hear genuine feedback from our viewers about the episode. If you like it please leave a comment, like it, subscribe the channel and do share it with like-minded people and beyond. Or write to us at [email protected] and [email protected].