Nischal Shetty is not only famous for founding India’s largest crypto exchange, WazirX but also for being vocal about the crypto regulations and putting his thoughts out in Twitter threads every now and then for supporting the crypto community. From being an advocate for a decentralised world to making decentralisation affordable, scalable & secure with Shardeum, he has come a long way.
In this interview, we will explore Nischal’s vision for Shardeum and how it aims to tackle one of the most persistent challenges in the crypto space – scalability. Nischal believes that the future of Web 3 is bright, with over one billion people set to join the web3 revolution in the next few years. Join us as we delve deeper into Nischal’s thoughts on the future of the web3 landscape and the role of emerging markets like India, as well as his insights on industry regulations and his plans for the future of Shardeum.
What challenges have you observed in the crypto space that inspired you to found Shardeum and how it is contributing?
Crypto will grow to over 1 Billion people in a few years. Despite the massive growth in web3 adoption, the scalability issue is the one issue that has remained consistent. For crypto to accommodate the rising mainstream demand, we need a solution to the current scalability issue.
It’s been discussed that sharding is the best solution to this issue, and Shardeum aims to do exactly that without compromising the principles of decentralization and security. Shardeum uses dynamic sharding to increase TPS (transactions per second) with the addition of every new node while retaining atomic composability. Shardeum provides low gas fees forever while maintaining true decentralization and solid security through dynamic state sharding. It focuses on providing high throughput, low latency, and immediate finality while maintaining the highest level of decentralization and security possible.
What are some changes you expect to see 5 years down the lane in the Web 3 landscape after making scalability, security & speed affordable with Shardeum? Coming to the adoption rate, Do you think developing countries will remain at forefront of the Web 3 revolution?
Emerging markets like India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc., and countries where blockchains are primarily used for gaming, payments, and P2P transfers will pave the way for mainstream blockchain adoption. Due to its low transaction fees and immediate finality, Shardeum aims to acquire a large user base in such markets.
Do you think that the increasing number of scams and market conditions can hamper the growth of web 3 startups as well as the inflow of funds in the industry?
The entire world including governments and law enforcement agencies are watching Web3 space very closely. Investors and public are becoming more cautious and doing thorough due diligence before investing. It’s crucial for projects to keep running external audits and bug bounty programs to keep investors assured, especially when it comes to smart contracts. Also, bear market is the best time to build and gives a great advantage to the early movers.
You have always been vocal about the industry regulations. After the latest statement from Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman (Finance minister of India) about achieving a standard operating procedure for crypto, how do you see 2023 for Crypto in India?
India is probably one of those few nations that have proposed a global regulatory framework for crypto. India has one of the fastest crypto adoption rates with a rapidly growing web3 community. 2023 is going to be the year when key crypto regulatory decisions will shape up across the world. This is a huge indicator of crypto going mainstream.
After founding India’s largest crypto exchange and going global with Shardeum, what is your next big plan?
With Shardeum, our goal is to make decentralization accessible to everyone. Most recently, we released our Betanet “Sphinx” on 2nd Feb 2023. The network has become one of the most decentralized testnet in web3, with over 1200 validators within a few days of the launch.
Sphinx was launched with over 2,500 live viewers and IRL watch parties organized and hosted by community members across 17 cities and 10 countries! Within 24 hours of the launch, over 200 nodes were run by community members.
Currently, Shardeum Sphinx has around 1400 validators. Most importantly, 95% of the validator nodes are run by the community! It’s a remarkable feat by an L1 and demonstrates the strength of the community. The user-friendly and permissionless GUI, along with minimum hardware requirements, has made Sphinx accessible and one of the most adopted testnets!
We released Sphinx 1.1 on 15th February 2023, and it’s already crossed 2000 total validators.
Our tech team is in the process of filing for some defensive patents on some of the innovations that have been developed. We’ll open-source the code for everyone to contribute as soon as the process is completed. All of the Shardeum code will be open-sourced. We’re also working on releasing the Shardeum whitepaper very soon.
