Nischal Shetty’s Shardeum Aims To Solve Blockchain’s Big Problems

*This is in partnership with BloombergQuint Brand Studio

Blockchain and its many applications (crypto being one) have grown from strength to strength in the past decade. In crypto alone, there are close to 300 million users out there. However, even as there are predictions that crypto users will touch one billion soon, there are barriers that must be surmounted.

The blockchain trilemma consists of scalability, low throughput and high fees faced by Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. These issues must be dealt with for crypto to be able to onboard the next billion people. The answer lies in ‘sharding,’ the process of partitioning and distributing data across various machines. It allows for large sets of data to be split into smaller chunks called ‘shards.’ In a sharded blockchain, incoming transactions are split across different shards that execute them faster with low transaction fees and computational requirements resulting in increased network scalability.

WazirX CEO and Co-Founder Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed, another globally respected cryptopreneur, who has three decades of helping organisations like NASA build scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems, have co-founded Shardeum, a completely new blockchain, to solve these issues. Shardeum is one of the first layer-one blockchains being built out of India and is developing cutting-edge technology that incorporates sharding and auto-scaling to provide high throughput, low latency, and immediate finality.

Shardeum aims to achieve this extremely challenging task without compromising the principles of decentralization and security that are core to blockchain technology. Shardeum will use dynamic compute and state sharding to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for global-scale decentralized applications. And like Internet, Shardeum will be open, collaborative, and community-driven and aims to democratize accessibility to decentralization. Shardeum will be the infrastructure on which the next iteration of the Internet which is Web3 will be built on.

The new outfit has a team of 20 divided between the US and India and Shetty will be responsible for building the community and business around the blockchain.Omar will manage the technology side of the project. Shardeum is targeting fundraising and alpha launch by April 2022 followed a beta launch in Q3 2022. The new blockchain is expected to be open to the public in Q4 2022.

“The current platforms are so focused on achieving a higher transaction rate that they sacrifice decentralization. We want to build a platform that is highly decentralized so that many people can participate, and the transaction rate actually increases with more participants. This is possible with dynamic sharding and is radically different than anything else that is out there. I think Shardeum will be like the Tesla of smart contract platforms,” said Omar Syed, Co-Founder, Shardeum.

Shardeum’s unique architecture and consensus mechanism encourage broad participation from nodes with minimal hardware requirements. The project aims to use Proof of Stake and Proof of Quorum as a consensus mechanism. Shardeum will also have a native utility token called SHARD ($SHM) which will be used for running transactions on the network, incentivizing validators, running DApps, etc. The project whitepaper will be made public soon.

There are multiple use cases for Shardeum. These include:

P2P Transfers: Shardeum’s unique architecture ensures immediate finality and high throughput and would encourage more Peer to Peer (P2P) transfers and exchange of digital assets on the network with low transaction fees.

DApps: Decentralised Applications can be built on Shardeum regardless of the underlying coding language and existing applications built for Ethereum will also work seamlessly through EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that provides developers with a distinct and accommodating experience.

DeFi: Decentralised Finance is a term for P2P financial services. DeFi protocols can be developed for lending, borrowing, trading, etc. which will benefit from being transparent, accessible, fair, and free through the Shardeum network.

NFT: A Non-Fungible Token represents ownership of digitally unique items that can be minted, purchased, sold, or traded. Shardeum plans to implement its own version of NFTs in the future and build a bridge to facilitate transfer of such assets between other blockchains.