WazirX Co-Founder Nischal Shetty Is Raising $20m for New Venture Being Valued at $200m

Shetty’s co-founder for Shardeum is US-based Blockchain architect Omar Syed.

WazirX Co-founder Nischal Shetty Is Raising $220m For New Venture

Nischal Shetty, the WazirX co-founder, has announced his plan to raise up to $20 million for a new blockchain venture, Shardeum, that aims to solve the existing shortcomings of Blockchains, such as Ethereum, including low scalability, high fees, and low throughput.

Shetty said, “Shardeum will be a sharded, infinitely scalable, completely decentralized L1 blockchain. In a few years, Crypto will grow to over one billion people. We want to provide a scalable, affordable and decentralized solution.”

According to Indian media reports, the funding will take the valuation of Shardeum, which Shetty is building with his US-based Co-founder and Blockchain architect Omar Syed, to nearly $200 million.

Sponsored

“We’re thrilled to have support from some of the top investors who believe in our mission of making decentralization accessible to everyone. Our funding round is currently ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more information on how we’re working to accelerate Web3 adoption in emerging economies like India,” Shetty said to the local media, adding that the startup is raising seed funds, and will soon make it official once the round is completed.

He continued, “The next 5 years will see Web3 reach over 1 billion users and the time to build infrastructure to support this growth is now.”

Shardeum: A Smart Contract Platform

Shardeum is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible sharded blockchain with “infinite” scalability, high decentralization, and increased security.

Sponsored

Shetty justified his decision to use EVM and said, “We decided to use EVM because we’re not here to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want to divide the community that already exists. The innovation of Shardeum is in making compute and state sharding possible. For everything else, if there is a good solution, we’ll use that.”

Issuing the “guiding principles for Shardeum” Shetty said, “In Shardeum, we have automatic scaling such that the Blockchain capacity increases as more users join the network. This ensures the fees will always remain low. We are expecting the fees to be in the INR 1 range.”

On the Flipside

  • WazirX remains under the Indian ED’s radar for laundering $350m through its parent company Zanmai Labs.

Why You Should Care

The startup aims to utilize “sharding architecture” to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for global-scale decentralized applications.

This article is for information purposes only and should not be considered trading or investment advice. Nothing herein shall be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading forex, cryptocurrencies, and CFDs pose a considerable risk of loss.

Author
Akriti Seth

Akriti is a Zurich-based reporter, focused on the political, regulatory, and legislative developments around crypto. She is a business journalist with over six years of experience working as a correspondent for organizations like Channel NewsAsia and Bloomberg TV India. In that time, Akriti has covered news in the finance, pharma, and state sectors.