Chingari Ranks as India’s Top Social Media App on Google Play

Chingari has emerged as the most popular social media app in India, with more than 32 million active users. It is a short video creating and sharing app and is fast gaining traction in this segment, emerging as a contender to Instagram reels.  Developed by Sumit Ghosh, Deepak Salvi, Aditya Kothari, and Biswatma Nayak, Chingari was launched in November 2018 on Google Play. It has been downloaded more than 85 million times since then, becoming India’s top free social media application.

Chingari allows users to create short videos and upload them on the platform to share with millions of users. Its popular in-built filters have been a major hit, allowing the application to enter the market dominated by international competitors, including TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram.

Users can choose to sing a song, lip-sync, dance, film their pets, create voice-over movie scenes, perform comedy acts or do something else creative with music in the background before sharing their content. Moreover, Chingari users can play games, purchase merchandise, and send messages to fellow content creators.

The app supports more than 20 Indian regional languages, in addition to English and Hindi. The platform’s straightforward interface lets users make videos of themselves and upload them within a short period.

Thus, it’s no surprise that Chingari managed to gain a massive user base within three years to become one of the most popular social media apps in a country with a population of more than 1.38 billion.

Chingari is the first Indian social media app to introduce its own cryptocurrency token. The platform raised $6 million through Initial Dex Offering (IDO) on SolRazr to launch its personalized cryptocurrency $GARI. Chingari also raised $19 million for its token round from leading crypto-based venture capitalists and private equity companies, namely Alameda Research, Solana Capital, Kraken, Republic Crypto, Galaxy Digital, among several others.

Launched in October, the cryptocurrency is built on the Solana blockchain. Thus, $GARI can benefit from Solana’s fast, low-cost transaction speeds. The cryptocurrency was ushered in by Bollywood megastar and Chingari brand ambassador Salman Khan.

$GARI will enable content creators to monetize their videos, allowing them to earn income from the Chingari app. They can also set up their own e-commerce spaces. The token will likely facilitate the sale of physical merchandise and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Chingari and allow fans to fund their favorite artists. The crypto integration is expected to accelerate its user base growth. Thus, Chingari is poised to remain at the very top of Google Play’s rankings for a long time.

Regarding the $GARI launch, Chingari CEO Sumit Ghosh said, “The future of a platform lies in its creators. On one side, we have an immense talent pool that needs to be explored and rewarded with an ethical amount of monetization. On the other side, while crypto experiences a rapid expansion in India, $GARI is poised to make it mainstream.

Chingari has demonstrated an impressive growth rate since its launch, becoming India’s top free social media app in just three years. Moreover, with the integration of cryptocurrency and an assortment of built-in features, Chingari is expected to retain its position on Google Play’s list for a very long period.