Nischal Shetty, the founder of WazirX, and Omar Syed, a blockchain architect, have announced Shardeum, a new web 3.0 platform designed to address one of the basic issues with web 3.0 platforms: scaling. Web 3.0 refers to the Internet’s third generation, which is based on blockchain technology and fueled by cryptocurrency.
According to Shetty, one of the most significant obstacles to crypto adoption is blockchain scalability, as present infrastructure is slow and expensive. He’s not the only one who believes this. Algorithms like Algorand were created to address scaling issues in existing platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Because of the significant growth in user numbers, all major blockchain networks have become slower as a result of network congestion, which makes them more expensive to maintain. Scaling challenges might develop as a result of storage constraints or expenses (known as gas fees) associated with cryptocurrency transactions.
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Unlike web 2.0 storage networks like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, web 3.0 platforms are decentralised, with data copied across multiple places, causing scaling issues.
Shardeum claims to solve this problem by sharding the blockchain, which divides it into smaller portions called shards and distributes the processing burden. Instead of validating every piece of data on the network, nodes will only have to validate data on certain shards.
This is designed to lessen the workload of a node and, as a result, network congestion. As a result, the number of transactions per second increases.
Shetty and Syed’s platform isn’t the only one experimenting with sharding. In reality, sharding has been proposed as an additional functionality for future Ethereum platform versions. Although Ethereum 2.0 is expected to share the network burden among 64 shards, sharding may not arrive until next year.
According to Shetty, implementing sharding on Ethereum may not be as simple as it appears, because transitioning from a non-sharded network to a sharded network can be problematic.
“Changing an existing network is going to be a very long drawn process. That is why when Ehereum will start sharding, they’ll also have a limited number of shards,” he said, adding that Sharedeum is built specifically with sharding as a initial point, and will have unlimited shards.
As per Shetty, as the number of users grows, the network would require more nodes. As additional nodes join the network, more shards will be produced, and the number of transactions per second will increase.
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SHARD ($SHM) will be the company’s utility currency, which will be utilised as a reward for validating and running decentralised apps (dapps). Low transaction fees and rapid finality in transaction processing, according to Shetty, might make Shardeum a tempting option in emerging countries like India and Brazil, where crypto trading has lately exploded.
The first version of Shardeum, Alphanet, is set to open in April 2022, followed by a second version, Betanet, in the third quarter of 2022. The project’s whitepaper will be available soon, and at the end of 2022, the mainnet, which is the final version, will be live.
He also stated that Shardeum will take a “community first” approach, much like other web 3.0 platforms today. “We are going to be building openly, which is why we have not raised any funds yet,” he shared. “We wanted to first open up the project and bring the community. We will be selling minorities to the investors while the majority will be actual for the community in terms of mining and air drops,” he added.
