WazirX co-founder raises up to $20M for new blockchain venture: Report
Crypto exchange WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty raises $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 told IANS that the startup is raising seed funds, and will soon make it official once the round is complete.
“We are thrilled to have the support of some of the best investors who believe in our goal of making decentralization accessible to everyone. Our funding round is currently ongoing and we look forward to sharing more information about how we are working to accelerate Web3 adoption in emerging economies like India,” Shetty said.
“In the next 5 years, Web3 will 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 decentralization and increased security.
The startup aims to use “sharding architecture” to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for decentralized applications on a global scale.
“In Shardeum, we have automatic scaling so that the Blockchain capacity increases as more users join the network. This ensures that the fees will always remain low. We expect the fees to be in the Rs 1 range,” Shetty told IANS.
The news comes amid the Binance-WazirX dispute following the ED raid on WazirX’s parent company Zanmai Lab earlier this month.
Binance disowned the Shetty-run crypto platform WazirX, removing the off-chain transfer channel between WazirX and Binance.
Shetty contested Binance’s claims, saying that Binance owns the WazirX domain name and has root access to AWS servers, holds all 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.
— IANS
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(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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