Quick take:
- WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty is raising $20 million for his new blockchain venture Shardeum.
- Shetty’s new fund will invest in highly scalable projects to overcome Ethereum’s high gas fees and low throughput.
- According to the announcement, Shardeum, which Shetty co-founded with Omar Syed, will up its total funding to $200 million after this fundraising.
Nischal Shetty on Tuesday said he’s raising $17-$20 million for his new blockchain-based venture Shardeum. Shardeum is a web3 investment firm that focuses on highly scalable projects in a bid to overcome high gas fees and low throughput experienced on the Ethereum network.
Shetty co-founded Shardeum with US-based co-founder and blockchain architect Omar Syed. According to the announcement, this funding will up Shardeum’s total fundraising to $200 million.
The company plans to make the fundraising official once it is complete. Commenting on the announcement, Shetty said: “We’re thrilled to have support from some of the top investors who believe in our mission of making decentralisation accessible to everyone. Our funding round is currently ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more information on how we’re working to accelerate Web3 adoption in emerging economies like India.”
Shetty foresees the Web3 user base growing to 1 billion over the next five years, which is why he believes the time to build the right infrastructure to drive growth is now.
Shardeum’s main purpose is to create the foundation for building scalable applications and overcome the shortcomings of existing blockchains like Ethereum. Shardeum is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain with infinite scalability.
Based on Shetty’s description, the platform is targeting the same level of scalability launched by Polygon with its zero-knowledge ethereum virtual machine zkEVM, announced last month.
Shardeum utilises a sharding mechanism, which allows it to dive the workload into several subtasks through rollups.
“In Shardeum, we have automatic scaling such that the Blockchain capacity increases as more users join the network. This ensures the fees will always remain low. We are expecting the fees to be in the Rs 1 range,” Shetty said.
Shardeum could become an important scaling solution on Ethereum before “the merge” is finally completed by next year.
The merge will proceed to the second stage in September, where users and developers will be encouraged to move to Ethereum 2.0, which utilises the proof-of-stake mechanism.
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