In the midst of a crypto bear market, where investors are getting cautious and in India, where regulatory hurdles persist, Nischal Shetty co-founder of Shardeum, a layer-1 EVM-based shared blockchain startup has raised a seed round of $18.28 million (around Rs 150 crore) from 60 investors.

The round includes prominent investors such as Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, Foresight Ventures. Other notable strategic investors include CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, ZebPay, Jsquare, MH Ventures, Nestcoin, Veris Ventures, Tupix Capital, Mapleblock Capital and NetZero Capital.

Many influential angel investors participated in the round, including Balaji Srinivasan, Mayur Gupta (CMO at Kraken), Michael Montero (Co-founder at Resy – acq. American Express and Co-Founder at CrowdTwist – acq. Oracle), Pankaj Gupta (VP Engineering at Coinbase), Harsh Rajat (Co-founder at Push Protocol), Nakul Gupta (Lead PM at Coinbase NFT Marketplace & Institutional Onboarding), Ajeet Khurana (Founder at Reflexical), Ravi Adusumalli (GP at Elevation Capital), Rohan Chauhan (Digital assets at Hudson River Trading), Ganesh Swami (Co-founder at Covalent), Kashif Raza (Founder at Bitinning), and more.

Nischal Shetty, also the founder of one of India's leading crypto exchanges WazirX said that one of the reasons for raising money from a large number of investors was not to concentrate the tokens in the hands of a few investors. “We kept an upper limit of $1-2 million, so that we get more investors which keeps Shardeum as a decentralised project. The other reason is we want participation from across the globe,” added Shetty.

Founded in 2017 by blockchain architect Omar Syed Shardeum will be launched in the first quarter of CY2023. At present the platform is running a test network and already has 140,000 wallets.

Shardeum is a proof-of-stake smart contract platform that offers vastly improved scaling capability when compared to other Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum. The blockchain uses dynamic state sharding technology, which allows it to linearly scale and increase TPS (transactions per second) with every node added to the network, ensuring that the network can maintain low gas fees indefinitely. A major hurdle for developers within the current blockchain ecosystem is that existing sharded blockchains don't allow for atomic composability across shards.

“The Blockchain Trilemma has been a difficult problem to solve, and scalability is the most significant factor that is preventing wider crypto adoption especially in emerging markets like India,” said Shardeum co-founder Nischal Shetty. “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.”

Shetty says that India will be a key market for Shardeum too. “India is one of the most important geographies especially when it comes to my association with the industry. India has not had a Layer-1 blockchain of its own. With this I want everyone in the crypto world to experience what it is to build a layer-1 blockchain,” added Shetty.

WazirX hurdles:

While Shetty has been focused on Shardeum, his earlier startup WazirX, along with other crypto exchanges, have been facing regulatory heat. Recently the company also sacked the majority of its employees. This is the first time that Shetty spoke about the issues that the Indian crypto exchanges and WazirX was going through.

When asked if WazriX would shut shop, Shetty disagreed. “WazirX is a great platform. The focus now is on over compliance and working with authorities to understand what is required as there are no regulations on this industry,” he added.

On the layoffs he said: Crypto exchanges globally have had to downsize. I don't think there's any country where there's not been downsizing. Startups globally have downsized and it's going to continue because we are all entering a period of a bear market not just for crypto but for the global economy. Everyone is restructuring to make sure that they can run for the period of pain that exists now. It is important for a startup to weather this storm and that is exactly what we have done.,”

On the recent run-ins with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) , Shetty said that crypto is a new technology and like in any new environment there will be pull and push from the regulatory bodies. “All we can do is help educate and clear all the confusion. At XazirX we are now focused on being over-compliant not just being compliant. The ultimate goal is to have a clean eco-system in the country,” said Shetty.

He added, “We are in a technology that is cutting edge, and it's not a surprise that there are regulatory issues, because its new. The younger generations who are getting into crypto, they understand that it's not regulated but also know that it has to be regulated. Every country and region is looking at this.”

In the midst of a crypto bear market, where investors are getting cautious and in India, where regulatory hurdles persist, Nischal Shetty co-founder of Shardeum, a layer-1 EVM-based shared blockchain startup has raised a seed round of $18.28 million (around Rs 150 crore) from 60 investors.

The round includes prominent investors such as Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, Foresight Ventures. Other notable strategic investors include CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, ZebPay, Jsquare, MH Ventures, Nestcoin, Veris Ventures, Tupix Capital, Mapleblock Capital and NetZero Capital.

Many influential angel investors participated in the round, including Balaji Srinivasan, Mayur Gupta (CMO at Kraken), Michael Montero (Co-founder at Resy – acq. American Express and Co-Founder at CrowdTwist – acq. Oracle), Pankaj Gupta (VP Engineering at Coinbase), Harsh Rajat (Co-founder at Push Protocol), Nakul Gupta (Lead PM at Coinbase NFT Marketplace & Institutional Onboarding), Ajeet Khurana (Founder at Reflexical), Ravi Adusumalli (GP at Elevation Capital), Rohan Chauhan (Digital assets at Hudson River Trading), Ganesh Swami (Co-founder at Covalent), Kashif Raza (Founder at Bitinning), and more.

Nischal Shetty, also the founder of one of India's leading crypto exchanges WazirX said that one of the reasons for raising money from a large number of investors was not to concentrate the tokens in the hands of a few investors. “We kept an upper limit of $1-2 million, so that we get more investors which keeps Shardeum as a decentralised project. The other reason is we want participation from across the globe,” added Shetty.

Founded in 2017 by blockchain architect Omar Syed Shardeum will be launched in the first quarter of CY2023. At present the platform is running a test network and already has 140,000 wallets.

Shardeum is a proof-of-stake smart contract platform that offers vastly improved scaling capability when compared to other Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum. The blockchain uses dynamic state sharding technology, which allows it to linearly scale and increase TPS (transactions per second) with every node added to the network, ensuring that the network can maintain low gas fees indefinitely. A major hurdle for developers within the current blockchain ecosystem is that existing sharded blockchains don't allow for atomic composability across shards.

“The Blockchain Trilemma has been a difficult problem to solve, and scalability is the most significant factor that is preventing wider crypto adoption especially in emerging markets like India,” said Shardeum co-founder Nischal Shetty. “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.”

Shetty says that India will be a key market for Shardeum too. “India is one of the most important geographies especially when it comes to my association with the industry. India has not had a Layer-1 blockchain of its own. With this I want everyone in the crypto world to experience what it is to build a layer-1 blockchain,” added Shetty.

WazirX hurdles:

While Shetty has been focused on Shardeum, his earlier startup WazirX, along with other crypto exchanges, have been facing regulatory heat. Recently the company also sacked the majority of its employees. This is the first time that Shetty spoke about the issues that the Indian crypto exchanges and WazirX was going through.

When asked if WazriX would shut shop, Shetty disagreed. “WazirX is a great platform. The focus now is on over compliance and working with authorities to understand what is required as there are no regulations on this industry,” he added.

On the layoffs he said: Crypto exchanges globally have had to downsize. I don't think there's any country where there's not been downsizing. Startups globally have downsized and it's going to continue because we are all entering a period of a bear market not just for crypto but for the global economy. Everyone is restructuring to make sure that they can run for the period of pain that exists now. It is important for a startup to weather this storm and that is exactly what we have done.,”

On the recent run-ins with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) , Shetty said that crypto is a new technology and like in any new environment there will be pull and push from the regulatory bodies. “All we can do is help educate and clear all the confusion. At XazirX we are now focused on being over-compliant not just being compliant. The ultimate goal is to have a clean eco-system in the country,” said Shetty.

He added, “We are in a technology that is cutting edge, and it's not a surprise that there are regulatory issues, because its new. The younger generations who are getting into crypto, they understand that it's not regulated but also know that it has to be regulated. Every country and region is looking at this.”