Is Shardeum India’s next big crypto project?

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Editor's note: Ethereum, the largest blockchain for decentralized apps and smart contracts, is often described by sceptics as an extremely expensive and extremely slow machine. It's a criticism applied to much of crypto. Security and complete decentralization are the top priorities for the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but that focus also makes them inefficient. As a result, some of the hottest crypto projects globally are those that promise scalability—faster transactions with fees a thousandth of the cost of Ethereum, or less. This includes Ethereum alternative blockchains like Solana and Cardano as well as what are known as layer 2 chains running on top of Ethereum, such as Polygon. We've written about India-founded Polygon, which recently raised $450 million from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and more, at length before. The catch is that most of these chains avoid bottlenecks by essentially sacrificing strict decentralization. Shardeum claims it's different. Announced by founders Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed at the beginning of February, Shardeum is something the Indian crypto community has been speculating about for the past month. Shetty is a co-founder and CEO …