Shardeum is raising funds at a $250 million token valuation

Shardeum, the Layer 1 blockchain co-founded by WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty, is raising a $5 million strategic round, three sources with knowledge of the matter told The Block.

The round looks set to give the startup a $250 million fully diluted valuation (FDV), which refers to the total value of the project assuming all of its tokens are in circulation, according to a pitch deck obtained by The Block.

The fundraising effort comes hot on the heels of the closing of Shardeum's $18.2 million seed round, which valued the startup at a $199 million FDV in October last year. Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, Jane Street and Foresight Ventures were just some of the backers who participated in the seed round.

"We have crossed over 500,000 users on our testnet in less than a year of its launch and already surpassed 5,000 validators on our betanet," Shetty said in an emailed statement. "The kind of traction and community-led growth Shardeum has witnessed has generated a lot of interest from our existing as well as new investors. We continue to talk to potential partners who can help us build Shardeum and grow the web3 ecosystem."

Tokenomics

The fundraising round is around 50% complete, said one of the sources. The deck shows that the funds from the strategic raise will be put toward marketing, building out the ecosystem, grants and operations.

"Though we are not actively looking to raise a new round, we often get strategic partners reaching out to be part of the Shardeum network," Shetty said. "In such cases, we try to figure out how to bring them in via strategic rounds but haven’t decided on any final numbers yet."

Shardeum's tokens, with the ticker SHM, are currently priced in the strategic round at $1, up from the $0.80 price in the seed round, according to the deck and two sources. Around 51% of the token supply will be used for validator rewards, per the deck. The supply of Shardeum tokens is fixed at 508 million, according to the project's litepaper. 

Ready for launch?

The proof-of-stake blockchain, which was co-founded by Shetty and former Nasa engineer Omar Syed, is still to launch. It uses dynamic state sharding technology in its pursuit of efficiency gains. Sharding helps split blockchain infrastructure into smaller pieces to try to scale the network and increase the transactions per second.

It's just one of several blockchains competing for market share in an already crowded landscape of established blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche as well as against newer chains that are also yet to launch, such as Sui and Sei.

Shardeum is targeting mainnet launch in the second quarter of this year, the pitch document shows. When the chain launches, around 49% of Shardeum's token supply will be generated, the deck said.

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