Shardeum- An effort to address issues with the current Blockchain technologies
The founder of crypto exchange WazirX announced a new blockchain called Shardeum, making it one of India’s first layer-one blockchains. The blockchain is set to compete with other technologies like Ethereum and Solana. Scalability and expensive transaction cost are the major problems in the current blockchain technologies. Shardeum is built to address these issues in particular. And all this will be achieved while maintaining a high level of decentralization.
“If you are looking at 200 million people today in crypto worldwide, this will go to a billion people in the future. There is no way the existing blockchains will be able to support that. Sharding is a known solution to solve this problem, which is what Shardeum is built on,” said Nischal Shetty, the founder of WazirX. “I think as you go deeper, you will realize it’s going to be a multi-chain universe. I want to make sure that for anyone who is looking for a decentralized scalable blockchain, Shardeum is the answer,” Shetty further added.
What is sharding, you ask? Well, it is breaking down any network into shards that are in layman language, multiple pieces in a manner that every shard is capable of executing transactions. The network in this gets faster as new computers join in, creating more shards.
Omar Syed, the builder of Shardeum,
started with it in 2017. He had been in contact with Nischal Shetty since 2019, and a few months ago, Shetty hopped the wagon as a cofounder. The duo plans to raise funds for the platform by April and launch its beta version in the third quarter of this year. If everything fares well, the blockchain will be open for public adoption by the end of 2022.
The two platforms WazirX and Shardeum, however, are not related. Making the latter his priority, in his statement to the media, Shetty said that he would be juggling between his responsibilities concerning the two. “I will have to devote a lot of time to Shardeum. I have put together a very solid team at WazirX. So I will definitely be devoting more time to this (Shardeum),” Shetty said.
Shard, as planned, the native portion of the whole project will be sold to private investors to fund the development of blockchain technology, which a non-profit organization will monitor. A white paper containing the details of the token split and the token economics with regards to this project is expected to be released soon.
The team of Shardeum comprises 20 people both from USA and India as of now. Shetty is responsible for building a community around the blockchain, and Syed, on the other hand, is responsible for the technical side of things. Since a blockchain’s success depends on the developer community the platform can attract, blockchains backed by venture capital worldwide focus on pouring in huge sums to attract developers to their ecosystem in India.
Since this new blockchain technology will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the applications built for other blockchains will be easily transferable to this budding one. The platform that developers use to create decentralized applications is EVM. The platform also aims to be a blockchain capable of handling over a billion people, a very highly probable traffic increase thanks to the blockchain and crypto revolution. The guiding principles of Shardeum will be based on being an Open, Collaborative, and Community-driven (OCC) platform, just like the internet.
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