India orders takedown of Jack Dorsey’s bitcoin-linked messaging app Bitchat

India’s top cybercrime watchdog has ordered GitHub to take down Bitchat, the offline messaging app built by Block chief executive and bitcoin advocate Jack Dorsey, as anti-government protesters in Delhi adopt mesh-networking tools to communicate through repeated internet shutdowns.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, part of the Home Ministry, issued the order late Thursday under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, naming three GitHub repositories tied to Bitchat and giving the platform three hours to disable access.

The notice, reviewed by CoinDesk, says the app enables anonymous communication without registration, phone numbers or centralized logging, and that its architecture “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation by law enforcement agencies.”

Bitchat is a decentralized messaging app that relays encrypted messages between phones over Bluetooth mesh networks, requiring no internet, servers or accounts. Dorsey released it as open-source software in July 2025.

Bitchat is built to relay bitcoin transactions offline, passing them phone to phone through the mesh until a device with connectivity broadcasts them to the network, a design meant to keep payments alive during blackouts, disasters or state-imposed shutdowns.

That is the property bitcoin’s supporters value most, the ability to transact without permission from any government or intermediary, and it is now being tested against a government trying to switch it off.

Since July 20, cities across India have seen some of their largest demonstrations in years as student protesters under the ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ — a poke at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — banner rally against a national exam scandal and are met with tear gas and baton charges.

The government has ordered repeated internet suspensions around the protest sites in New Delhi, and researchers have documented demonstrators turning to Bluetooth mesh apps, Bitchat among them, to keep coordinating once the connection drops.

The takedown order targets one of the tools that made the shutdowns easier to circumvent.

Whether GitHub complied within the three-hour window was not clear as of publication. CoinDesk could access and download the application on both Google and Apple stores as of Asian afternoon hours Friday.

The Microsoft-owned platform has removed repositories under Indian legal orders before, and open-source projects are typically mirrored across other hosts, meaning a takedown rarely erases the code entirely.