In a seed round headed by Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures, the layer-1 blockchain Shardeum has raised $18.2 million at a valuation of $200 million.
A New layer 1 Blockchain on the Horizon
CoinGecko Ventures is one of Shardeum’s strategic investors, along with the likes of former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, CMO of Kraken Mayur Gupta, co-founders of Resy and CrowdTwist Michael Montero, VP of Engineering at Coinbase Pankaj Gupta, co-founder of Push Protocol Harsh Rajat, lead product manager of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace and institutional onboarding Nakul Gupta.
The additional capital will be used by Shardeum to boost its marketing and development teams as well as its research initiatives. In addition to providing a platform that incentivizes developers to create and grow the Shardeum ecosystem, the firm has announced that it will actively sponsor hackathons in India and the United States over the coming year.
Shardeum, introduced in February 2022 by Nischal Shetty (who also co-founded cryptocurrency exchange WazirX) and blockchain engineer Omar Syed, addresses issues of scalability and high transaction costs without compromising on decentralization.
The scalability problem
Shardeum is a blockchain platform for smart contracts that outperforms Ethereum and other basic blockchains in terms of scalability. Due to its use of dynamic state sharding, the blockchain can enhance its throughput and expand linearly as more nodes are added to the network.
Commenting on the motivation behind the creation of the project, Shardeum co-founder Shetty told media outlet the Economic Times:
“The Web3 ecosystem has been on a massive growth spree. For Web3 to onboard 1 billion users in the next few years, we need a scalable L1 blockchain which ensures 1 cent fees forever while maintaining decentralization. Shardeum aims to make that happen.”
It is anticipated that the Beta network will be live by the end of the year, with a transaction throughput of 200 TPS (Transactions per second) on the blockchain.
