Shardeum is an EVM-based, autoscaling L1 blockchain that leverages dynamic state sharding to achieve true decentralization, solid security and ultra-low transaction fees under $0.01—solving the scalability trilemma once and for all.
SHM is the ticker/currency symbol of Shardeum’s native token.
SHM trading is live on leading crypto exchanges including Bitget, Kucoin, LBank and MEXC. For full list of exchanges, please visit this webpage.
More use cases are on the way as we roll out new features and partnerships—leveraging Shardeum’s autoscaling infrastructure to deliver greater benefits to end users.
Any EVM-compatible wallet will work on Shardeum.
Vision: Make decentralization accessible to everyone
Mission: Power peer-to-peer payments
Industry Segment: PayFi
Following the successful launch of mainnet, Shardeum is unveiling its mission: Powering Peer-to-Peer Payments.
Blockchains today,
Shardeum,
Shardeum is purpose-built as a truly scalable payment layer for the open internet. We believe payments should be open, instant, and affordable — free from borders, delays, and high costs — and native to the internet. Shardeum fills this critical gap in an underserved multi-trillion dollar market. Shardeum’s payment strategy will cover both macro and micro payments in the PayFi space. You can check our mainnet mission announcement blog here.
Thanks to its novel architecture and features — including dynamic state sharding, and autoscaling — Shardeum can process transactions efficiently without congestion or resource strain. As a result, the network maintains consistently low fees (under $0.01), regardless of demand.
Because Shardeum can scale linearly by adding more shards as new nodes join, it avoids the fee spikes common in other blockchains. This ensures transaction costs remain stable, predictable, and accessible for everyone—permanently.
You can find our latest roadmap here. Shardeum’s PayFi roadmap will be released soon, outlining how you can help shape this mission. Stay tuned as we unveil key milestones that will introduce new features, and partnerships, to enable payment-focused services on Shardeum.
You can find the latest tutorials here. Advanced users can check our developer docs if needed.
Besides self-hosting, you can run your node using one-click setups, and VPS providers. However, please note that Shardeum does not endorse or take responsibility for any third-party services. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR).
You can find the mainnet endpoint here.
Following features are live on mainnet:
Smart contract functionality is scheduled for test deployment in Q2 of 2025, and live launch in Q3 of 2025.
As mentioned above, always start with this golden rule: Do Your Own Research (DYOR). It’s especially crucial in a space like Web3, which blends cutting-edge technology with elements of finance, economics, capital markets, and governance. Blockchain isn’t just about innovation—it’s about empowering individuals with true ownership of their assets and data, offering a decentralized alternative to traditional systems. At its core, it promotes transparency, permissionless access, and open-source infrastructure—all of which make informed decision-making essential.
With this foundation in mind, you can start with setting up a self-custodial wallet and connecting to decentralized networks. This blog guides you through that process and highlights other key steps to help ensure a secure experience.
Here is the link to Shardeum whitepaper.
OCC is short for Open, Collaborative and Community-Driven. OCC is the core principle of Shardeum. Much like the Internet, Shardeum will be open, collaborative, and community-driven and would democratize accessibility to decentralization. Shardeum will be the infrastructure on which the next iteration of the Internet, Web3, will be built.
Validator Nodes (also known as Validators):
These nodes validate network transactions by actively participating in the consensus process. Shardeum rewards honest validators with SHM. Validator nodes store only the state of the accounts they manage, ensuring they remain lightweight, while historical data is offloaded to archive nodes. To participate, validators must stake a minimum of amount of SHM and will face eviction/ penalties for non-compliance with network protocols, such as leaving the network prematurely or failing to sync on time, among other violations.
Archive Nodes:
Archive nodes maintain the entire transaction history. Archive nodes may also be required to stake SHM and could face slashing penalties for failing to adhere to network protocols, such as leaving the network without prior approval. The reward for running an archiver is expected to be about 10x more than running a validator since the hardware requirements for running an archiver will be much higher. At mainnet launch, Shardeum will initially operate archive nodes, with plans to gradually open them to the community after approximately one year.
Standby Nodes:
Standby nodes are validator nodes within the network that are not actively participating in consensus. These nodes enable the Shardeum network to scale quickly when transaction volume increases. Additionally, to ensure optimal security and fairness, the network randomly rotates the oldest active validators out at the end of each cycle, replacing them with standby validators. Standby nodes are required to stake the same minimum amount of SHM as active validator nodes. They become eligible for rewards only after successfully completing their term as active validators.
Other than the aforementioned nodes, there are other types of nodes needed to move data and transactions in and out of the Shardeum as well as monitor the health of the network. These include connector nodes, relayer nodes, and additionally, a monitor server. The connector nodes provide an entry point for external wallets and clients to query and submit transactions to the network. These are the similar to RPC nodes in the Ethereum ecosystem. Relayer nodes communicate with archiver nodes or other relayer nodes to store and stream data produced by the network to downstream services used by exchanges and explorer services. These are similar to exit nodes in the Ethereum ecosystem. The monitor server is an important component here receiving status updates from active validator nodes and providing a visual view into the health of the network. You can read more about them in our whitepaper.
In simple words, sharding breaks the job of validating and confirming transactions into small and manageable bits, or shards. While sharding is ultimately the best way to tackle the scalability issue, applying it to blockchain-based networks is not nearly as easy as applying it to centralized databases.
The good news with Shardeum is that the consensus and processing are done at the transaction level and not at the block level. And, through dynamic state sharding, the network will shard its state by evenly and dynamically distributing compute workload, storage, and bandwidth among all the nodes. This not only allows for parallel processing of transactions but also very low storage requirements for validator nodes as they will store only the state data of transactions/accounts they are involved in.
The protocol assigns each node to cover one or more unique address ranges in such a way that for any given address there is a well defined number of nodes holding the data for that address. Each node added to the network allows other nodes to slightly reduce the total addresses they cover while still ensuring that any given address has the specified level of redundancy.
And why are they important? Well, this is how Shardeum will get to maintain low transaction fees for developers and end users forever. Dynamic state sharding helps the network to scale linearly making it the first Web3 network to do so.
Autoscaling in Shardeum means the network can automatically adjust its capacity in response to demand by leveraging dynamic state sharding. When more validator nodes join the network, new shards are added to distribute the load, allowing throughput (TPS) to scale linearly with the number of nodes.
Unlike most blockchain networks, where fixed block sizes and conflicting resource constraints limit scalability, Shardeum’s architecture resolves this by allowing the protocol to self-govern node participation. This ensures optimal network size, improved resource utilization, and consistent performance—without needing manual intervention.
By aligning node incentives with network requirements, Shardeum ensures that autoscaling is a built-in protocol capability that directly benefits end users through low latency, low fees, and high throughput.
With the help of dynamic state sharding, every node added to the network will increase the transaction throughput instantly. By simply adding more nodes from the network’s ‘standby nodes’ set during peak demand, the TPS will increase proportionally making Shardeum the first Web3 network to scale linearly. And this is the main X factor that impacts every other outcome on a blockchain network favorably including throughput, decentralization, security, and low transaction fees irrespective of the demand in the network.
High throughput means that the network should process a vast number of transactions per second (TPS).
Unlike traditional blockchains that process transactions sequentially, Shardeum handles them concurrently across shards, enabling significantly higher TPS while maintaining low latency and fees.
Shardeum achieves high throughput by using dynamic state sharding—a technique that splits the network into multiple shards, each capable of processing transactions in parallel. As more nodes join the network, Shardeum automatically adds new shards, allowing the network to scale linearly without compromising decentralization or security. Scaling up with each new node is a first in the blockchain industry.
High fairness means that a transaction received by the network earlier than another one should be processed accordingly.
In a blockchain-based network, transactions within a block are considered to have occurred simultaneously, and the order in which they are applied does not matter. For some applications like games, this does not provide sufficient time resolution. Also, it is possible for transactions that were received much later to be processed before earlier transactions. In most networks, you can get priority by paying more gas fees.
Shardeum processes transactions in the order received preventing MEV, and ultimately bad user experience.
Low latency means the total turnaround time between submitting a valid transaction to the network and knowing that the network has committed to the transaction in a short period of time. In networks like Bitcoin, latency is the time between submitting the transaction and including it in a block. For such networks, the fastest latency is no less than the average block production time which is around 10 minutes.
Shardeum achieves low latency—processing each transaction within seconds—by handling them individually before bundling them into blocks.
Yes, Shardeum’s source code is open-sourced after we completed defensive patent filings for innovations in our protocol, including the consensus algorithm, autoscaling, and dynamic state sharding, in 2024.
Explore all our projects, contribute to their development, and use the Shardeum protocol to build scalable Web3 applications.
No. TPS (transactions per second) should reflect only successful, user-initiated transactions processed by the network. It should not include internal protocol activities—such as communication between nodes—or failed transactions. Including such activity would inflate the TPS metric and misrepresent real network throughput.
