Shardeum in 2024: Driving Decentralization Toward Ubiquity
In 2024, Shardeum achieved major milestones, including its successful Incentivized Testnet, to establish a solid foundation for mainnet launch and...
In 2024, Shardeum achieved major milestones, including its successful Incentivized Testnet, to establish a solid foundation for mainnet launch and...
For Shardeum, 2024 was a fulfilling and necessary period in our evolution. As the blockchain industry matured, Shardeum emerged to address the limitations of earlier blockchains—including scalability and high transaction costs—head-on. These challenges have long hindered blockchain projects from fully unlocking the transformative potential of blockchain technology.
While innovations like Layer-2 solutions, app-specific chains, and zero-knowledge proofs have been crucial for the Web3 ecosystem, our focus on delivering autoscaling and dynamic state sharding right at Layer 1 is what sets us apart. Today, even traditional Web2 systems face hurdles in autoscaling massive databases. Imagine a public blockchain that can seamlessly handle the throughput demanded by AAA gaming, enterprise applications, and even government-level deployments—all while preserving security and decentralization. Shardeum’s vision is to accomplish this in a Web3 environment, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and robust composability, through its breakthrough protocol.
With the mainnet launch scheduled for March 2025 and groundbreaking features like autoscaling planned for later in the year, Shardeum is set to redefine industry standards. Despite the blockchain industry’s multi-trillion-dollar valuation, it remains largely untested for mass adoption due to prevailing technological constraints and limited public engagement—both essential for making decentralization a universal reality. Shardeum, however, undergoes continuous, large-scale testing and validation by a vast community—as evidenced by the impressive figures highlighted in this blog below. And why do they matter? Well, trust in centralized systems isn’t always guaranteed, even in mature markets—let alone in less affluent regions. Decentralization and its trustless nature can be life-changing, much like the Internet, often in ways people and even institutions don’t immediately realize.
The featured image captures this journey adequately—depicting validator nodes on the Shardeum testnet spanning six continents! With evolving regulations and growing visibility, the network’s reach is set to become even more globally distributed.
Let’s now recap 2024 with some of the incredible highlights 🙂
We didn’t expect such an overwhelming response when the project launched in February 2022, nor did we foresee our community growing to over 1.4 million members in such a short time. Make no mistake, we are grateful for this wonderful surprise. We realized this is how we could truly overcome the scalability trilemma and lead Web3 toward mass adoption in a way that resonates with everyday people. This figure below represents the total testnet metrics recorded in 2024.
Our ongoing incentivized testnet (ITN) was launched in June 2024, and we’re thrilled to see the community engage with the same enthusiasm as during the previous year’s betanet phase. The scale of participation, as highlighted below, is rarely seen in public testnets. The continuous feedback loop between our engineering team and the community has been instrumental in rigorously testing and refining the network, ensuring it is battle-ready for the mainnet launch.
Shardeum launched two Bug Bounty programs with Immunefi, awarding $950K to white hats and security researchers, for helping us to strengthen and secure the network.
Meaningful decentralization begins here. Open-sourcing Shardeum’s codebase marked a significant milestone in 2024, reinforcing our commitment to accessibility and co-creation. This initiative, further, ensures that anyone, anywhere in the world, can contribute to, develop on, and leverage our innovative protocol for their own projects. From the RPC server to validator dashboards, our GitHub repositories have been made publicly available, embodying our vision of a truly collaborative ecosystem.
Shardeum made a global impact throughout 2024 by actively participating in prominent Web3 events worldwide. Our team members engaged with communities and industry leaders at the following events:
Proof of Community events continued to grow as one of Shardeum’s most impactful initiatives, expanding into six new countries – Japan, Zambia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Cameroon. This brought our total reach to 20 countries worldwide. Proof of Community is an initiative of Shardeum to educate and guide young people about blockchain technology and decentralized applications by conducting public meetups, campus events, and community workshops.
We achieved a significant milestone this year as we celebrated our 400th Proof of Community event – a testament to the power of grassroots blockchain education and engagement.
By the numbers:
Proof Of Community was also conducted at some of the prominent blockchain events in 2024:
As Proof of Community continues to grow, it reinforces one fundamental truth – blockchain isn’t just technology, it’s about the people who build and believe in it!
Through the Super Shardian ambassador program, Shardians from 74 countries played a vital role in amplifying Shardeum’s presence, fostering engagement, and stewarding the ecosystem. In 2024, we celebrated their contributions by awarding over $27,000 in rewards. The program encouraged active participation, especially in non-technical campaigns, such as creating X threads, moderating the community, organizing Shardeum Leagues, and nominating Discord/Telegram members of the month, with winners chosen by community votes.
Content creators around the world continued to participate enthusiastically in our Shardeum is Borderless program in 2024. Over 2500 blog and video submissions in 49+ languages poured in from 66+ countries, solidifying Shardeum’s commitment to inclusivity.
Decentralization and blockchain isn’t just for developers – it’s for everyone.
This year, Shardeum launched Shardeum University to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and new adopters eager to explore the Web3 space. Whether you’re a beginner curious about blockchain or a seasoned enthusiast looking to expand your knowledge, Shardeum University was built to make learning accessible, engaging, and practical.
Key Highlights:
Shardeum University reflects our belief that education is the cornerstone of decentralization. By empowering individuals with the right knowledge, we’re not just onboarding users – we’re nurturing future contributors and leaders in the blockchain space.
At Shardeum, we believe that learning should be as rewarding as it is informative. To make blockchain knowledge more interactive, we introduced the Blockchain Quiz – a fun and engaging way to test and expand participants’ understanding of blockchain fundamentals.
The response was overwhelming: 85,500 participants joined the quiz representing 51 countries across the globe. The Blockchain Quiz not only helped onboard new users but also fostered a sense of community by encouraging friendly competition and shared learning.
As a highly anticipated Layer-1 blockchain, Shardeum has been featured in several leading media outlet in 2024, highlighting its innovative contributions to the blockchain industry and underscoring its growing influence in shaping the future of decentralization.
Behind every milestone and achievement is a dedicated, passionate team committed to bringing Shardeum’s vision to life. In 2024, we welcomed 23 new team members from 12 countries, further strengthening our global reach and capabilities. Our diverse team reflects the very essence of decentralization – borderless collaboration, innovation, and shared purpose. Here are the two key leadership hires in 2024:
1. Chris Chabot – Championing Open Source Development
Shardeum reinforced its commitment to open-source innovation with the appointment of Chris Chabot. Chris brings extensive experience in developer relations and global team leadership, having previously served as:
2. Srini Parthasarathy – Driving Technical Excellence as CTO
Shardeum appointed Srinivasan “Srini” Parthasarathy as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), marking a key milestone in accelerating the project’s technical roadmap. Srini brings over 30 years of experience in senior engineering and leadership roles across both traditional and blockchain technology sectors.
Before joining Shardeum, Srini served as:
In his new role, Srini will lead the development and scaling of the Shardeum ecosystem, helping to bring the mainnet vision to life in 2025.
With these leadership hires, Shardeum is poised to take significant strides toward decentralization, scalability, and global adoption.
As we close out 2024, the foundation has been set for an even more transformative year ahead. With the mainnet launch on the horizon, 2025 promises to be a defining chapter in Shardeum’s journey.
Fueled by the dedication of our team and the unwavering support of our global community, Shardeum remains steadfast in its mission – to deliver decentralization for everyone and build a borderless, inclusive future.
The best is yet to come.
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