WazirX Co-Founder Nischal Shetty Is Raising $20m for New Venture Being Valued at $200m

08/24/2022

2 minutes read

2022.08.24 16:01

Nischal Shetty, the WazirX co-founder, has announced his plan to raise up to $20 million for a new blockchain venture, Shardeum, that aims to solve the existing shortcomings of Blockchains, such as Ethereum, including low scalability, high fees, and low throughput.

1/ Announcing Shardeum@Shardeum will be a sharded, infinitely scalable, completely decentralized L1 blockchainIn a few years Crypto will grow to over 1 Billion peopleWe want to provide a scalable, affordable & decentralized solutionMore in thread below #BuildForCrypto

— Nischal (Shardeum) (@NischalShetty) February 2, 2022

Shetty said, “Shardeum will be a sharded, infinitely scalable, completely decentralized L1 blockchain. In a few years, Crypto will grow to over one billion people. We want to provide a scalable, affordable and decentralized solution.”

According to Indian media reports, the funding will take the valuation of Shardeum, which Shetty is building with his US-based Co-founder and Blockchain architect Omar Syed, to nearly $200 million.

“We’re thrilled to have support from some of the top investors who believe in our mission of making decentralization accessible to everyone. Our funding round is currently ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more information on how we’re working to accelerate Web3 adoption in emerging economies like India,” Shetty said to the local media, adding that the startup is raising seed funds, and will soon make it official once the round is completed.

He continued, “The next 5 years will see Web3 reach over 1 billion users and the time to build infrastructure to support this growth is now.”

Shardeum: A Smart Contract Platform

Shardeum is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible sharded blockchain with “infinite” scalability, high decentralization, and increased security.

Shetty justified his decision to use EVM and said, “We decided to use EVM because we’re not here to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want to divide the community that already exists. The innovation of Shardeum is in making compute and state sharding possible. For everything else, if there is a good solution, we’ll use that.”

4/ We decided to use EVM because we’re not here to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want to divide the community that already existsThe innovation of Shardeum is in making compute and state sharding possible. For everything else, if there is a good solution, we’ll use that

— Nischal (Shardeum) (@NischalShetty) February 2, 2022

Issuing the “guiding principles for Shardeum” Shetty said, “In Shardeum, we have automatic scaling such that the Blockchain capacity increases as more users join the network. This ensures the fees will always remain low. We are expecting the fees to be in the INR 1 range.”

On the Flipside

WazirX remains under the Indian ED’s radar for laundering $350m through its parent company Zanmai Labs.

Why You Should Care

The startup aims to utilize “sharding architecture” to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for global-scale decentralized applications.