Shetty said that unlike other blockchains, Shardeum will solve for scalability and expensive transaction costs, while maintaining a high level of decentralisation, which he said was lacking in most blockchains today.
“If you are looking at 200 million people today in crypto worldwide, this will go to a billion people in the future. There is no way the existing blockchains will be able to support that. Sharding is a known solution to solve this problem, which is what Shardeum is built on,” he said.
Sharding is breaking down a network into multiple pieces (shards) in such a way that every shard can execute transactions. The network gets faster as new computers join it to create more shards.
The bootstrapped venture, founded by Shetty and the builder of Shardeum, Omar Syed, plans to raise funds by April and launch in beta in the third quarter of the year. The blockchain itself will be opened for public adoption by the end of 2022.
Syed started building the blockchain in 2017 and Shetty has been in contact with him since 2019. Shetty officially joined as a cofounder a few months ago.
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Shardeum and WazirX, it’s worth noting, are not related. Shetty told ET that he would juggle his roles at WazirX and Shardeum, but the latter would be his priority for now.
“I will have to devote a lot of time to Shardeum. I have put together a very solid team at WazirX. So I’ll definitely be devoting more time to this,” Shetty said.
A portion of the native token of the project, called Shard, will be sold to private investors to fund the development of the blockchain, which will be overseen by a nonprofit organisation. A white paper with details of the token split and token economics is expected to be released soon.
Shardeum currently has a team of 20 people between the US and India. While Syed handles the technical side, Shetty is responsible for building a community around the blockchain. A blockchain’s success depends on the developer community it is able to attract to build on it. Blockchains backed by venture capital globally are pouring in huge sums to attract developers to their ecosystem in India.
Since Shardeum will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, applications built for the other blockchain will be easily transferable to it, Shetty said. EVM is the software platform that developers can use to create decentralised applications (DApps) on the Ethereum blockchain.
“I think as you go deeper, you’ll realise it’s going to be a multi-chain universe. I want to make sure that for anyone who’s looking for a decentralised scalable blockchain, Shardeum is the answer,” Shetty said.
