On October 18, Blockchain startup, Shardeum announced that it has raised $18.2 million in a seed round of funding from more than 50 investors. Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures participated among 50 investors. Other strategic investors like CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, and ZebPay also participated in the round. According to the company, the funds raised will be allocated towards ramping up the company’s research and marketing efforts as well as its product and design development team.  

Shardeum, a layer 1 blockchain co-founded by Nischal Shetty, a co-founder of WazirX, is an Ethereum virtual machine-based sharded blockchain, meaning anything that works on Ethereum can work on Shardeum.  

Sharding generally alludes to parting a blockchain’s infrastructure into smaller pieces to improve scalability, a noted problem with the Ethereum blockchain, and to accelerate transaction times and lower charges. Shardeum can scale boundlessly, growing transactions per second as demand increases, Shetty said.  

“Shardeum acts a lot like your traditional websites, where if you get a lot of traffic, you just add a server so it expands,” he said. “The same concept works on Shardeum, where every time there’s a lot of traffic, you need more transactions. You just add more nodes and the transaction capacity increases.”  

In the following two or three weeks, Shardeum intends to present an "autoscale" feature that will permit the transactions each second to automatically contract when traffic goes down. The blockchain’s test network will launch by this year’s end with the mainnet continuing in the second quarter of 2023.  

Throughout the following year, Shardeum will have hackathons in the United States and India furthermore giving an incentive platform for developers who want to help construct and develop the blockchain’s ecosystem.  

“We’re looking at India as one of the major markets for us. There’s never been an L1 built in India,” Shetty said, noting that Shardeum plans to enter other emerging markets.