Indian crypto entrepreneur’s blockchain venture seeks $200 million in seed funding – TechCrunch

Indian crypto exchange WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise an initial round of funding for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed funding round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as discussions are ongoing and private. The funding round proposes to value the startup at around $200 million, the sources added.

Spartan Group, Struck Crypto, Big Brain Holdings and Cogient Ventures are among some of the investors committed to participating in the round, the sources said.

Shetty confirmed that the startup is in talks to raise funding, but said the round has not closed.

“We are currently working with top VCs in an ongoing funding round. Although not yet closed, we expect to see great support for Shardeum and our mission to make blockchain technology faster, smarter and easier to use for everyone,” he said in a statement through a spokesperson.

“We look forward to sharing more details about how we’re working to turbocharge the expansion of our team and accelerate Web3 adoption for developers and their users.”

Shardeum tries to solve the trilemma that affects most blockchains, where they have to prioritize among scalability, security and decentralization, but at best they can choose only two of these characteristics.

Shardeum uses a technique called sharding that divides the network into shards, resulting in multiple transactions being processed, verified and validated in parallel, the startup explained in an investor deck reviewed by TechCrunch.

The startup’s eponymous blockchain, which is currently in the testnet, aims to be EVM compatible and use proof-of-stake and proof-of-quorum consensus mechanisms to reduce the cost of running the network and rely on three types of nodes – validator, archiving and standby — in its network, it said in the investor deck.

Shardeum expects it will be able to process over 100,000 transactions per second with 100,000 nodes and will maintain a latency of 10 seconds, the deck says. The L1 blockchain will also provide ways to help Ethereum developers transition to Shardeum and maintain stable gas fees, it said.

The startup plans to initially target Indian and emerging markets, according to two sources familiar with the matter. It aims to perform mainnet launch in the quarter starting October and launch over 500 million SHM tokens, the deck said.