India’s top cybercrime watchdog has ordered GitHub to remove Bitchat, the offline messaging app built by Block chief and bitcoin advocate Jack Dorsey, as anti-government protesters in Delhi use mesh networking tools to communicate through repeated internet shutdowns.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, late Thursday issued the order under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, naming three GitHub repositories linked to Bitchat and giving the platform three hours to disable access.
The announcement, reviewed by CoinDesk, says the app enables anonymous communication without registration, phone numbers or centralized logging, and that its architecture “significantly hinders lawful interception, attribution and investigation by law enforcement.”
Bitchat is a decentralized messaging app that forwards encrypted messages between phones via Bluetooth mesh networks that don’t require internet, servers or accounts. Dorsey released it as open source software in July 2025.
Bitchat is built to relay bitcoin transactions offline, sending them phone-to-phone across the web until a connected device sends them to the network, a design meant to keep payments alive during power outages, disasters or government-imposed shutdowns.
