“If I can get India onchain, the rest will follow."

Move over, Men in Black—there’s a new FBI in town, and they're not chasing hackers... they're hosting hackathons instead, and changing the future of what it means to be onchain.

In today’s Farcaster VIP feature, we meet Saumya Saxena, the founder and driving force behind Farcaster Builders India (FBI) and also the newly minted Head of Base India.

Saumya’s journey is one of passion, reinvention, and a career-long obsession with building in public. Hailing from Kanpur, India, a city where academics run deep and teaching is practically the family business, Saumya was the first in his lineage to break from tradition and pursue engineering instead of education at college. While most of his relatives stuck to the chalkboard, Saumya charted his own path, trading textbooks for tech stacks.

Growing up, Saumya’s world revolved around football (that’d be soccer to some of you) and academic excellence. His family’s deep-rooted focus on education meant that 40% of their household income routinely went toward making sure he and his younger brother had the best schooling.

“There was no question I was going to be an engineer,” Saumya laughs. “But it’s only when I actually pursued engineering as a career that I realized… I didn’t want to be an engineer after all.”

Many such cases.

That particular realization came after completing a degree in aeronautical engineering and doing a short stint working in the research field. During one such gig, the penny dropped—quite literally—when his professor asked him to help make up an invoice.

“I realized the professor was making a ton of money off the research we were doing and I thought, why am I not on the other side of this equation?”

Saumya then pivoted into finance, accepting a junior role with a consulting firm, and it wasn’t long before he was rubbing elbows with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, consulting on infrastructure projects as an ambitious (if a little green) 22-year-old.

This job was definitely challenging and fun, and allowed Saumya to travel far and wide, which was a nice bonus for a professional of his age. But then a near-death accident while traveling in the mountains of India brought his fast-paced career to a Himalayan halt.

“It was a real wake-up call,” he says. “And I started to ask myself, what am I really doing with my time?”

That experience led him into a period of work in the charity field, where he spent a year helping scale operations and fundraising for a large nonprofit. It was there that Saumya says he honed his storytelling and strategic skills, applying his background in finance to create impact in a new space.

But while the nonprofit world provided a sense of purpose, Saumya’s love for building new things kept tugging at him. It was during this time that he stumbled across the concepts of blockchain and decentralized systems and realized that onchain governance could be the ultimate tool for creating real-world impact at scale. The obsession took hold, and soon enough, he was diving headfirst into the world of crypto.

In 2020, Saumya would become fully immersed in the onchain space. “I got obsessed with the idea of decentralized governance and building and realized I wanted to bring it to India,” he says. The pandemic played a role in his decision to go full-time into crypto, and by 2021, he had left the traditional finance world behind altogether.

“When you get into crypto full time, it’s like diving into a black hole of endless possibilities,” Saumya says. In those early days, he and a rag-tag gang of builder friends would gather online to chat and collaborate on onchain apps. “We’d sit in Discord servers all night building products with people we’d never met in real life. And honestly, we built some really cool shit.”

This group would go on to develop around 20 crypto products over a 10 month period. Some went viral.

“We were each bringing different skills to the table,” he recalls. “Someone was great at UX, someone else could do tokenomics. We had the perfect blend of people.”

Enter FBI. The Farcaster Builders India group began as a simple Telegram group chat where Saumya and a handful of close friends (many from that aforementioned Discord server) wanted to build things just for fun.

“I made a group called Farcaster Builders India, and it suddenly hit me—the acronym is FBI!” Saumya laughs. “I even said in the first message, ‘This could become a meme one day,’ and well, here we are.”

FBI’s first builder hackathon, which took place in Bangalore, was a success by all accounts, attracting top talent from across India. “It was all about building on Farcaster Frames,” Saumya explains. “Nobody was chasing the prizes—we just wanted to see what we could unlock on Farcaster.”

Saumya’s own journey into the Farcaster ecosystem had begun in late 2022, when he was exploring the potential of consumer social applications in the onchain space. “I had this thesis that consumer social was going to take off,” he explains. Farcaster caught his attention because of its decentralized nature and the opportunities it presented for building products in a truly permissionless environment.

“It wasn’t just about creating another social app—it was about building an ecosystem where users actually owned their own digital presence.”

Saumya saw Farcaster as a playground for developers, where experimentation was encouraged -- and that sparked his excitement. “Farcaster had this open, collaborative vibe where people were constantly building and riffing off each other’s ideas. That’s where I wanted to be.” It wasn’t long before he was fully immersed, rallying other builders in India to join him in shaping the future of decentralized social.

And the rest is history. Today, FBI has hosted over 30 meetups and hackathons across India, established itself as a major player in the Indian builder scene, and is even expanding internationally, with FBI Africa (Farcaster Builders "International") now gaining momentum too.

“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come,” Saumya reflects. “We’ve built this community that thrives on collaboration and shared vision.”

Recently, Base started looking for someone to lead their India operations. At first, Saumya was approached to recommend candidates for the role. He considered it carefully, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized… why not me? After all, he had been driving the onchain movement in India through FBI, building a strong community of based developers and thinkers in that part of the world. So, instead of sending in a recommendation in the end, Saumya put his own name forward.

“I told them, ‘Actually, I think I’m the right fit,’” he recalls with a grin. And just like that, the role of Head of Base India found its perfect candidate. “I really love Jesse Pollak’s leadership style," says Saumya, and Base’s mission aligns perfectly with what we’re trying to do in India.”

Looking ahead, Saumya’s goals are clear: Bring the world onchain, starting with India. “India’s tech scene is already miles ahead in terms of infrastructure and scalability. We’re just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up,” he says.

So, what’s next for Farcaster VIP Saumya Saxena? World domination? Maybe. But for now, he’s focused on getting India—and eventually the world—onchain, one builder at a time. Whether he’s rallying a crew for the next hackathon or teaching his newborn son the finer points of Dune, Saumya is all about the long game.

“If I can get India onchain, the rest will follow,” he says confidently. And if Saumya's reputation is anything to go on, that’s not a threat—it’s a promise.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And if you are enjoying this Farcaster VIPs series, please drop a comment below and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. <3