WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty launches Shardeum Blockchain | Digit

WazirX founder Nischal Shetty has announced a new blockchain called Shardeum. He has joined hands with blockchain designer Omar Syed. And with this indigenous solution, Mr. Shetty aims to take on incumbent blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. This open-source initiative will take upon the challenge to solve the scalability issues faced by contemporary blockchains.

Here’s everything we know about Shardeum at the moment:

Shardeum: What is it and what are its touted benefits?

Although announced in February 2022, Omar Syed has apparently been working on it going all the way back to 2017. Mr. Shetty had come in contact with the project sometime in 2019, but it was only a few months back that he officially took the mantle of co-founding the project. And for now, he aims to prioritize Shardeum over WazirX.

Well, it is not just those two, but a team of 20 people is currently involved in the project. 

Coming to the project, it works on the process of ‘sharding’, which is a database partitioning technique involving the splitting of a blockchain network into small partitions called ‘shards’. To mine more shards, more computers would join the network, thus adding resources to the said network.

Now, this sharding mechanism is what sets Shardeum apart from most, if not all blockchains. Nischal is bullish that this technology would be able to tackle the scalability issues that prevalent solutions might face someday due to the surging crypto userbase.

He also claims Shardeum with its underpinning sharding tech should be able to cut transaction costs while ensuring a high level of decentralization compared to existing blockchains.

And to meet the costs leading up to that, Nischal is looking for fundraising by April of this year. His plan is to sell only a minor portion of the aforementioned shard (which is also the native token of the project) to investors, while the rest would be meant for the community through mining and airdrops. This funding process would be administered by a non-profit organization. A white paper detailing the ins and outs of this process should be released soon.

Nischal is targeting the alpha stage of Shardeum to be here by the April 2022 fundraising time. Then by Q3, 2022, a beta launch is expected, and finally, the main version should be out towards the end of Q4, 2022. If all goes as planned, in its desired state, Shardeum is touted to support a million transactions per second. Mr. Shetty further envisions its inherent compatibility with Ethereum Virtual Machine should allow for easy transferability of other blockchain-based apps to Shardeum.

And so as you see, there are a lot of promises here, but only time will tell if it actually pans out to be a promising venture.