Amit Bhardwaj — A Misguided Genius
Amit Bhardwaj was born on 22nd January 2022 at the age of 38. It was kidney failure followed by cardiac arrest.
Most of us don’t know about him, and those who know to recall him being a criminal.
But Amit was once hailed as a top-notch entrepreneur in India. People called him a pioneer in digital currency. His book launches were front advertisements in the leading newspapers. Reporters were falling over each other on what a wunderkind he was. And the Bollywood endorsements — from Shilpa Shetty to Neha Dhupia Bipasha Basu were busy tweeting about his works.
He will be, though, like most cases in India, most of what he was accused of was never proved. But he was a pioneer, and genius — may be an evil one. And surely ahead of his time in whatever he did, and most did not fully understand both his work and fraud.
India or even the Indian diaspora had never been a contributor to blockchain technology. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a whole host of altcoins, and mining were all spearheaded by folks from the UK, Europe, Russia, and possibly Japan. But as expected, India became 10% of the global volume of cryptocurrency trading — after all, it is easy money.
Amit Bhardwaj was however a pioneer in this space. As a computer engineer in 2004), his entrepreneurial zeal (and maybe greed) saw the emerging opportunities when the famous “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” paper by Satoshi Nakamoto came out in 2008. It started with dabbling in the trade, and in 2016 two companies — Amaze Mining and Blockchain Research (which is for altcoin/non-bitcoin mining), and GB Miners (which promised superordinate returns to investments in cryptocurrency).
The launch was a spectacle. Times of India carried a full front page advertisement for his e-book “Cryptocurrency for Beginners” at INR 1,499, and it included tokens to trade on his platform. Similar advertisements were there in The Hindu, The Economic Times, and Dainik Jagran. And a slew of celebrity endorsements.
Not just that. Sponsored posts were there on NDTV Profit, Hindu Business Line, Indian Express, Bitcoin News, and News BTC. In other words, Amit Bhardwaj was a sensation overnight.
As we know, in a country of Jugaad there are enough suckers who fell for this and invested. But beyond an initial few cases, the returns were hard to come by. Causes possibly can be many — including impossible targets, inability to mine new coins, and of course the legendary volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
And so the complaints too came in, and Amit Bhardwaj, his brother, and other accomplices were soon arrested. Estimates said he had garnered 80,000 bitcoins valued at USD 2.7 billion, and there were promises too that the investors would be paid back. And the case dragged on.
Bitcoin, altcoin, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, and blockchain all moved on. Many things happened globally, and locally. And mostly common people lost interest — as it was no longer seen as a vehicle to make some quick bucks with pure speculation.
Amit Bhardwaj, unfortunately, suffered reverses on other fronts too. He developed severe kidney problems and died of cardiac arrest in Jan 2022. Almost unnoticed.
Amit Bhardwaj was accused of being a Ponzi fraud, and hopefully, someday he and his team will be convicted. But he was smart, ambitious, and a visionary. But maybe too ambitious, and clearly in a country where we feel good calling others unethical and survival without a “hand on the shoulders” is difficult in stake businesses.
I wonder what would have happened had he had the support on the scale one prominent businessman is getting today, where his success is being equated with the country’s success? Or had he been in another country with more appetite for risk, where the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried are considered brilliant by many, and Micheal Milken has been accommodated again?
We can only wonder.
