WazirX co-founder raising up to $20 mn for new Blockchain venture

NEW DELHI: Crypto exchange WazirX’s co-founder Nischal Shetty is raising $17-$20 million for his new Blockchain-based venture called Shardeum.

According to sources, 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. Shetty said the start-up is raising seed funds, and will soon make it official once the round is completed.

“We’re thrilled to have support from some of the top investors who believe in our mission of making decentralisation 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. “The next 5 years will see Web3 reach over 1 billion users and the time to build infrastructure to support this growth is now,” he added.

Shardeum aims to solve the existing shortcomings of Blockchains, such as Ethereum, including low scalability, high fees, and low throughput.

Shardeum is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible sharded blockchain with ‘infinite’ scalability, high decentralisation and increased security.

The start-up aims to utilise “sharding architecture” to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for global-scale decentralised applications. “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 Rs 1 range,” Shetty said.

The news comes amid Binance-WazirX dispute after ED raids on WazirX’s parent company Zanmai Lab earlier this month.

Binance disowned the Shetty-run crypto platform WazirX, and removed the off-chain fund transfer channel between WazirX and Binance.

Shetty disputed Binance’s claims, saying Binance owns WazirX domain name and has root access to AWS servers, has all the crypto assets and crypto profits. On November 21, 2019, Binance said it had “acquired” WazirX.

WazirX is the largest crypto exchange in India and its annual trading volume exceeded $43 billion in 2021.