Crypto is overhyped, but India’s real power lies in building AI infrastructure: iSpirt’s Sharad Sharma

When Sharad Sharma speaks, India’s tech community listens. As co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation and one of the key minds behind India Stack, Sharad Sharma has helped shape the digital backbone that powers billions of transactions today. From leading R&D at Yahoo, Symantec, and Lucent to mentoring founders and policymakers, his influence spans three decades of India’s technology evolution.

In the latest episode of the Clearing the Blur podcast hosted by Rajiv Jayaraman (Founder & CEO, KNOLSKAPE) and Deepak Sharma (Board Member, Digital Leader & Founder-CEO, Venture Studios), Sharad joined the conversation on how India can turn the AI moment into a movement. Across a wide-ranging discussion, he explored everything from crypto’s misplaced hype to India’s underfunded R&D culture and the future of data collectives.

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Here are five takeaways that reveal how Sharma sees India’s next orbit change, and why the country’s “real superpower” lies in crisis, not comfort.

• “Crypto Is the Most Overhyped Tech Today”

When asked which technology is overhyped, Sharma didn’t hesitate. “Crypto,” he said. While he acknowledged its components, distributed ledgers, zero-knowledge proofs, and permissionless innovation, Sharma argued that the technology’s scalability remains limited. “In the modern world, permissionless innovation is difficult to do,” he noted, citing regulatory and cost barriers. Yet, ever the systems thinker, he pointed to one bright spot: asset tokenization. “There are pockets where it will have applicability,” he said. “But it won’t have broad-base adoption the way maximalists imagine.”

• “Our Biggest Weakness? R&D.”

Despite India’s reputation as a global digital powerhouse, Sharma believes the country’s R&D culture is alarmingly weak. “Our top five companies together spend just 0.1% of their profits on R&D,” he revealed. “It’s an embarrassment.” For Sharma, this lack of research-driven innovation is India’s true Achilles’ heel, especially when global AI development depends on deep science and long-term experimentation. “Big companies have the money but not the mindset; small companies have the mindset but not the money,” he said. “We have to fix that equation.”

• “India’s Next AI Advantage Won’t Come from Data Scraping, It’ll Come from Data Collectives”

Unlike Silicon Valley, which built AI models by scraping the open internet, Sharma sees India’s next advantage coming from data collectives: secure, consent-based ecosystems where AI models “travel to the data” instead of the other way around.

“India will never have open datasets because of privacy concerns,” Sharma explained. “But we can build open infrastructure that reduces barriers and allows many small AI models to thrive.” Through frameworks like DEPA (Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture), India is standardizing how organizations can safely share data for innovation: a model that has already caught global attention, earning India the co-chair role at the Global AI Summit in Paris.

• “India’s Real Superpower Is Crisis”

Sharma’s most striking observation wasn’t about technology at all, it was about psychology.“It’s hard in an old civilization like ours to create a sense of crisis,” he said. “But change happens through fear or greed. We need a crisis to unlearn.” Citing the rapid COVID vaccination drive built on India Stack, Sharma showed how urgency fuels innovation. “The radical idea was not to add more vaccination centers and yet we vaccinated a billion people in record time,” he said. “Because we looked at it as an innovation problem, not a policy one.”’

• “From AI Hype to AI Infrastructure”

Sharma believes India’s AI journey will hinge on building the invisible scaffolding not just algorithms, but the data, compute, and regulatory architecture that enable trust. That means thinking in terms of “techno-legal regulation” where public policy and public technology evolve together. “Making rules alone doesn’t shape market behavior,” Sharma said. “You need both hands of the potter, policy and technology working together.”

The Big Picture: India’s Resisted Rise

For Sharma, India’s innovation story is a “resisted rise”: one that demands grit, not global validation. “After decades as the world’s back office, we have to move from process innovation to product innovation,” he said. “That’s the only path to strategic autonomy.” And if history is any guide, its crisis, not comfort, that will light that path. Speaking on the most hyped.