Nischal Shetty’s Shardeum Secures $5.4 Mn Funding

WazirX founder Nischal Shetty’s Shardeum, a layer-1 blockchain based on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), said in a blog post it has raised $5.4 Mn in a strategic funding round.

The participants for the strategic raise included Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, TRGC, Jsquare, Bware Labs, Tané Labs, Hyperithm Group, Luganodes, Blockchain Ventures Hub, CryptoViet Ventures and Blue7, among others.

Shardeum said it plans to leverage the incoming funding to support the ecosystem’s growth in the lead-up to the mainnet launch later this year.

The funding round comes after Shardeum’s $18.2 Mn seed round in October 2022, with investors such as Jane Street, Big Brain Holdings, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Ghaf Capital, DFG, CoinGecko Ventures and Foresight Ventures.

Founded in 2022 by Shetty and the US-based blockchain architect Omar Syed, Shardeum is an EVM-based layer-1 blockchain deploying dynamic state sharding to keep gas fees low and transactions per second high as participation grows. 

The startup claims to be built on the principles of OCC (open, collaborative and community-driven) and is currently operating a testnet, as mentioned previously. As of July 7, 2023, Shardeum’s testnet has seen more than 7.4 Mn transactions with 820K+ accounts and over 230K contracts deployed.

For the uninitiated, sharding is partitioning to distribute a network’s computational and storage workload across the network’s nodes, so that each node operator does not have to shoulder the total transactional load on the network. 

Dynamic state sharding or dynamic sharding is built to be flexible and easily adaptable to changes in the overall blockchain ecosystem, sharding the state, network and transactions on the blockchain across all network nodes.

Apart from that, Shardeum has also deployed its native utility token called SHARD ($SHM) on the network. Going forward, the token will largely be available for use on the platform for running transactions on the network, incentivising validators and running DApps, among others.

“The completion of this strategic raise from key participants puts Shardeum in a position to expand on our mission to cultivate a diverse community. Given Shardeum’s consensus design and use of dynamic state sharding, validator participation is highly accessible regardless of user access to computing resources,” said Kelsey McGuire, chief growth officer at Shardeum.

“This raise allows us to continue to prioritise decentralisation by growing our community of participants worldwide through education and other key initiatives,” McGuire added.