Ayush Varshney was trying to board a flight to Sri Lanka when immigration officials stopped him at Mumbai’s international airport on March 10, 2026. A Look Out Circular had been issued after he ignored repeated CBI summons. He’s the first person from Darwin Labs — the tech company that built GainBitcoin’s infrastructure — to be arrested. The scheme itself collapsed in 2017.
That’s a nine-year gap between the fraud and the first custody, which tells you something about how these cases move.
Varshney was Darwin Labs’ CTO. His role, according to CBI sources, wasn’t to recruit investors — it was to make the operation look real. He designed the MCAP token, wrote the ERC-20 smart contracts, built the payment gateways, and co-developed GBMiners.com, the Coin Bank Bitcoin wallet, and the GainBitcoin investor portal. Darwin Labs co-founders Sahil Baghla and Nikunj Jain are also named in the investigation. The technical layer they built gave a textbook Ponzi scheme the appearance of a functioning crypto business.
GainBitcoin was launched in 2015 by Amit Bhardwaj and his brother Ajay Bhardwaj through Variabletech Pte. Ltd., a Singapore entity. The offer: deposit Bitcoin, receive 10% monthly returns for up to 18 months. New investor money paid earlier investors. Bitcoin’s own rising price masked the underlying problem for a while — early participants got paid, spread the word, and the scheme grew. Around 8,000 direct investors came in, with a much larger number affected through referral chains.
By 2017, fresh capital dried up. Rather than acknowledge the shortfall, Bhardwaj and associates switched all payouts from Bitcoin to MCAP — a token they had created and controlled, with no meaningful market value. Investors who were owed Bitcoin got MCAP instead. It was worth almost nothing. Conservative estimates put total investor losses at Rs 6,606 crore. Other assessments go beyond Rs 20,000 crore.
Amit Bhardwaj died in 2022 on bail, before any conviction. The case eventually sprawled across eight states before the Supreme Court handed it to the CBI. The ED has been running a parallel money-laundering investigation. February 2025 raids across 60 locations turned up Rs 23.94 crore in crypto and substantial digital evidence. Investigators are now trying to trace 29,000 mined Bitcoins that appear to have been moved offshore.
On the red flags:
A 10% monthly return in crypto is not an investment — it’s a recruitment tool. Legitimate returns vary and can go negative; the fixed-return promise is the tell, not the asset class. MLM crypto schemes work on the same mechanics as any other pyramid: if you need to bring in new participants to generate your return, the underlying token is window dressing.
The MCAP switch deserves specific attention because versions of it will appear again. The operator replaces the asset you were promised — one you can sell, one with real market value — with one they fully control, at a moment of their choosing, with no contractual obligation to you. It’s not a platform update. It’s an exit. And the Singapore registration while operating in India isn’t a corporate formality — it’s deliberate structure designed to limit what Indian courts can reach.
GainBitcoin’s first arrest came nine years in. Its central figure died without facing conviction. If that’s the deterrence profile for a Rs 20,000 crore fraud, it explains why the pipeline keeps producing new cases.
Leave a Reply