Blockchain startup, Shardeum, has raised $18.2 million in seed round of funding, the company said in a statement. The round saw participation from close to 50 investors, including Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures among others.

Strategic investors like CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, and ZebPay also participated in the round. According to the company, the funds raised will be allocated towards ramping up the company’s research and marketing efforts as well as its product and design development team.

Launched in February 2022 by Nischal Shetty who previously founded cryptocurrency exchange WazirX - and blockchain architect Omar Syed, Shardeum solves for scalability and expensive transaction costs, while maintaining a high level of decentralisation, which Shetty said was lacking in most blockchains today in an earlier interview.

Shardeum provides a smart contract platform that offers vastly improved scaling capability when compared to other base-level blockchains like Ethereum. The blockchain uses dynamic state sharding technology, which allows it to linearly scale and increase transactions per second with every node added to the network.

Sharding is breaking down a network into multiple pieces (shards) in a way that every shard can execute transactions. The network gets faster as new computers join it to create more shards.

“The Blockchain trilemma has been a difficult problem to solve, and scalability is the most significant factor that is preventing wider crypto adoption, especially in emerging markets like India,” said Shardeum co-founder Shetty.

“The Web3 ecosystem has been on a massive growth spree. For Web3 to onboard 1 billion users in the next few years, we need a scalable L1 blockchain which ensures 1 cent fees forever while maintaining decentralization. Shardeum aims to make that happen,” he added.

Shardeum is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a software platform that developers can use to create decentralised applications (DApps) on the Ethereum blockchain. Hence, applications built for the other blockchain will be easily transferable to it.