Nischal Shetty’s Shardeum raises $5.4 million in a strategic round

Nischal Shetty, co-founder, Shardeum

Layer 1 blockchain network Shardeum has raised $5.4 million in a strategic round from Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, JSquare, TRGC and others ahead of its mainnet launch later this year.

The fresh capital will be used to support the growth of the ecosystem before the launch of mainnet, which is when a blockchain protocol gets fully developed and is up for public use, the company said on July 8.

Mainnet is a distributed, operational digital network that serves as the primary infrastructure and a foundation for the network for a particular cryptocurrency.

The round comes nine months after Shardeum raised $18.2 million in a seed round at a valuation of $200 million from several prominent investors.

Co-founder Nischal Shetty said the two key objectives of this strategic round were to enable Web3 for project teams and startups which want to use Shardeum’s network. The second was to expand to new geographies and create new communities.

“These two reasons led to the creation of the strategic round. The objective wasn’t a typical private sale. It was to cherry-pick those investors and projects who can bring strong strategic value to the Shardeum ecosystem. This round helps us build a more friendly and collaborative ecosystem around Shardeum,” Shetty tweeted.

In an interview to Moneycontrol in May, Shetty, who also co-founded crypto exchange WazirX, said his priority was to hit the mainnet this year.

“We want to build a user community of over 2 million in the next six months. We have already done over 100 products on our network in the testnet. We want to cross 500 in the next six months. There are wallets, decentralised exchanges, dex aggregators being built and then products built only for Shardeum,” he said.

“We also have a few geographic targets, like Nigeria, Vietnam and the US. We have already hired a chief growth officer in the US.”

The completion of the strategic raise from key participants would allow Shardeum to expand to cultivate a global and diverse community, chief growth officer Kelsey McGuire said.

“Given Shardeum’s consensus design and use of dynamic state sharding, validator participation is highly accessible regardless of user access to computing resources,” McGuire said.

As of July 7, over 7.4 million transactions occurred on Shardeum’s testnet, with 820,000 accounts and over 230,000 contracts deployed, the company said.

Shardeum was founded by Shetty and blockchain architect Omar Syed, who has been working on this project since 2017.