Nischal Shetty, founder of crypto exchange WazirX and blockchain architect Omar Syed, are launching a L1 blockchain network “Shardeum” which is an EVM-compatible sharded blockchain with infinite scalability, true decentralisation, and solid security.
The word ‘Shardeum’ has been derived from the technique ‘Sharding’ which is being utilised to resolve the problem of scalability. Shardeum will use dynamic compute and state sharding to accommodate users, allowing for global-scale decentralised applications. The project will incorporate sharding and auto-scaling to provide high throughput, low latency, and immediate finality.
The open-source project aims to solve the issues which are faced by Layer 1 (L1) blockchains like low throughput and high fees. “The fees are typically high because of the low number of transactions. We aim to solve that, gradually with the increasing number of users, the limitations will increase but we will aim to tackle that,” said Shetty.
He added that this give the developers an opportunity to build on blockchain which was till date very limited for the hurdles.
Due to the network’s low transaction fees and immediate finality, Shardeum plans to acquire a large user base in emerging markets like India, Brazil, Nigeria, among others where blockchains are primarily used for Gaming, payments, and P2P transfers
Shardeum is aimed to be built on the principles of being open, collaborative and community-driven, and the netizens will have access to discussions, information, ideas, documents.
Shardeum will also have a native utility token called SHARD ($SHM) which will be used for running transactions on the network, incentivising validators, running DApps, etc. The duo plans to raise capital via a closed token sale but plans to launch it soon for the public.
Shetty also added that they are also setting up a non-profit entity and the project whitepaper will be made public soon.
Shardeum is targeting fundraising by April 2022 followed by its betanet launch in Q3 2022. The mainnet is estimated to launch towards the end of Q4 2022.
Shetty will continue in his current role at Binance-backed WazirX. Syed, who is joining Shetty on the project, organized the Shardus project in 2017 to build a linearly scalable blockchain. Over the past three decades, he has been involved with organisations such as NASA, Yahoo, and Zynga to build scalable distributed systems.
The project will be in the same segment as Ethereum which was launched in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin. Today, Ether which is the native cryptocurrency of the network, is second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation.
