After nearly two years of delays, Shardeum, the highly anticipated EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain founded by WazirX founder Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed, is set to launch its mainnet on 5 May 2025. The project, which has attracted great deal of attention for its approach to blockchain scalability, recently pushed back its launch date from 15 April, citing market volatility rather than technical concerns.

In an exclusive interview with BW Businessworld, Shardeum’s Chief Technology Officer Srinivasan “Srini” Parthasarathy, who joined the company approximately seven months ago, explained the reasoning behind the most recent schedule adjustment: “It’s not really a delay. We just wanted to change the date given the turmoil in the markets. When we launch, we wanted to be sure that the market environment was good.”

According to Parthasarathy, the technology itself is ready for deployment. “We’ve been running a dry run of the mainnet for several weeks now. So, we know that the technology is cooked and ready. We’re just waiting for the markets to kind of settle down,” he added.

Founded in February 2022, Shardeum was initially scheduled to launch in Q2 2023 but has faced multiple postponements. Despite these setbacks, the project has built an impressive community of supporters, with 1.2 million contributors and over 171,000 validators on its testnets.

“The founders of Shardeum had this incredible idea of building this decentralised secure layer one network that scales linearly and infinitely, and keeping gas rates low at the same time. It’s a very attractive concept,” said Parthasarathy, explaining the project’s strong community support. “The community wants to see us succeed. They’ve been really behind us. They’ve put all their efforts into it.”

What is “Sharding”?

Central to Shardeum’s innovation is its approach to dynamic state sharding, which Parthasarathy explained using a spreadsheet analogy. While traditional blockchains require every validator to maintain a complete copy of the entire ledger, Shardeum divides its state into smaller, more manageable portions or “shards.”

“Imagine, it is like, instead of having a spreadsheet with say a billion plus rows, we break that up into multiple tabs,” Parthasarathy explained. “The responsibility for a node is just the context of that much smaller subset. So validated nodes can be smaller, very small footprint, require less memory, require less disc space. And so, it’s basically affordable by people all over the world.“

This architectural approach helps Shardeum to scale dynamically as demand increases. “As the transaction volume grows, as more and more people come in and do more stuff, we can make that from 10 to 20 tabs. And what that does is it literally doubles the throughput because it’s not changing. We are just scaling out,” said Parthasarathy.

Another key differentiator for Shardeum is its transaction-level consensus mechanism. “Every other network lets you write one block at a time. Shardeum doesn’t deal in blocks. For us, block is not a native concept to Shardeum, we deal with individual transactions,” noted Parthasarathy. “We write one cell at a time so we can be faster, nimbler. We don’t have to wait for a block to be assembled, and we don’t allow people to play games with rearranging the transactions within a block.”

Ambitious Project

The project has attracted financial backing, having raised USD 18.2 million in October 2022 during the crypto winter, with an additional USD 13 million since 2023 from investors including Arrington Capital and Amber Group.

Parthasarathy acknowledged the complexity of developing such an ambitious project. “This is not an easy product. We are building a blockchain. When you have a sharded system like Shardeum and a dynamically sharded system like Shardeum where we don’t deal in blocks, where every transaction is individually finalised, the problem becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.”

Since joining Shardeum, Parthasarathy has focused on transforming the technology into a market-ready product. “It’s one thing to be creating this amazing technology, but then taking that and packaging that into a product that can then be positioned in the marketplace is a slightly different problem that needs to be solved,” he said.

“The Shardeum Mainnet launch is a significant moment of pride for India’s Web3 evolution. It’s encouraging to see Indian founders stepping onto the global stage and building with ambition and purpose. Milestones like these reflect the growing maturity of our ecosystem and the potential it holds. At CIFDAQ, we see this as further validation of the need for strong, user-focused infrastructure that supports the future of digital finance and capability of Indian founders to build global scale web3 companies,” Himanshu Maradiya, Founder & Chairman, CIFDAQ Group told BW Businessworld.

While the initial Shardeum mainnet launch will not immediately support decentralised applications (dApps), Shardeum plans a phased rollout with this functionality coming in subsequent weeks. As an EVM-compatible network, Shardeum has been designed to easily accommodate applications built for other Ethereum-compatible chains.

“Any dApp built with Solidity, running on any EVM chain would just transparently and easily be ported over,” said Parthasarathy. “Because the gas fees are going to be much lower, I can see a whole slew of DeFi applications, NFT applications and anything that requires a secure, stable, linearly scalable network with low gas fees coming on to Shardeum.”

The high gas fees on existing networks have been a huge barrier to adoption in the ecosystem, as Parthasarathy shared from personal experience: “Before I came to Shardeum, I was with a company, where we had a marketplace, an NFT marketplace for race horses in the US. People were paying, when we launched the transaction fee – it was USD 200 per token. So, people were paying USD 200 transaction fee to buy a USD 1,200 NFT.”

Parthasarathy says he sees substantial growth for the network in the coming year. “In a year from now, we should have a very robust EVM framework built out. A year from now, I think we are going to be a very different Shardeum network.”