Committer of the Month: Justin Lauria, Technical Project Manager

In our latest edition of ‘About Shardeum Team‘, we have Justin, who is also the committer for the month of March 2025.

Justin Lauria is a Technical Project Manager and acting QA Manager at Shardeum. While working in the past as a software engineer at Zynga and Amazon, he discovered that he was quite interested in project management tasks like planning, coordinating, and facilitating, which naturally led him to pursue a career as a TPM. He adds that signing on as a committer for Shardeum was a perfect fit and he has been so excited to be able to contribute every day!”

You can find Justin on LinkedIn

Let’s Now Chat with Justin!

Jereme/Will: What are you helping to build at Shardeum?

Justin: At Shardeum, I’m helping to build a highly scalable and sustainable blockchain platform that will be essential for the future of Web3. As a Technical Project Manager, I help bridge the gap between the product team and the development team, ensuring smooth communication and efficient project execution. I prioritize tasks, help clarify the scope of work, and promote effective communication among the team, and provide regular status updates to stakeholders to help keep everyone moving in the same direction.

What excites me most about Shardeum is the potential for its technology to bring blockchain to a much wider audience. Shardeum’s innovative approach—powered by a key technology known as dynamic state sharding—helps to solve the scalability trilemma (the notion that a blockchain can only achieve, at best, two out of three of the following features: scalability, decentralization, and security) and ensures low transaction fees even as adoption increases. By providing a solution that can scale sustainably without compromising decentralization, we’re helping to pave the way for decentralized applications to reach the masses in an affordable, sustainable manner.

In a larger sense, I’m helping to build a platform that will play a vital role in shaping the future of decentralized technology, and I’m proud to be part of the team driving this innovation forward.

Jereme/Will: What sets Shardeum apart?

Justin: Shardeum stands out because it solves the scalability trilemma by offering a truly decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain solution. While many blockchain platforms focus on either scalability and security or decentralization and security, Shardeum can achieve all three through dynamic state sharding. This is because our network can scale horizontally, adding more nodes and shards as demand increases, without compromising decentralization. Unlike other platforms that rely on vertical scaling (upgrading hardware), Shardeum can expand its capacity seamlessly, ensuring that throughput remains uncompromised even as network demand grows.

Another key differentiator is Shardeum’s focus on sustainability. Many blockchain networks face the issue of high transaction fees as they become more popular, making decentralized applications increasingly expensive to use. Shardeum’s unique architecture ensures that transaction costs remain low even with increased adoption, which makes it more accessible for both developers and users. This feature is especially important in a world where decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and other use cases require low-cost, high-throughput platforms to thrive.

In addition, Shardeum offers a developer-friendly experience by maintaining Ethereum compatibility. This allows developers to build decentralized applications without having to learn an entirely new system, making it easier for existing Ethereum developers to transition to Shardeum. The ability to scale efficiently while keeping costs low is essential for the widespread adoption of Web3 and Shardeum is uniquely positioned to lead the way in this space.

Jereme/Will: How can our community members uplift Shardeum?

Justin: One of the best ways, in my opinion, is to participate in the network by running a well-performing validator node of your own!  By running validator nodes, community members contribute directly to the decentralization and security of the Shardeum network, ensuring that it remains robust and trustworthy as it scales.

For those who aren’t able to run a node on their own computer/hardware, there are some great one-click options available that allow community members to easily run validator nodes via a cloud infrastructure provider.

Jereme/Will: What was your journey into Web3?

Justin: My journey into Web3 started with my long-standing interest in finance. I’ve always been passionate about financial systems and how they’ve shaped (and at times, broken) our world. After deep-diving into the history/origin story of Bitcoin, I was sold on the ability of cryptocurrencies to offer a more transparent and secure financial system, free from the all-too-common manipulative practices that come with centralized control. That, paired with my background as a software engineer, gave me a good idea of the kind of work I wanted to do next.

While working to transition my career into the field of project management, I had the opportunity to reconnect with my former boss at Zynga, who is now the VP of Engineering at Shardeum. Our conversations—ranging from the ambitious goals of the team to the groundbreaking innovations unfolding within the company—was nothing short of inspiring. After a short time, I knew I had to be part of the journey. I submitted an application, and soon after, I was thrilled to join the team.

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Note to the community: If you’re interested to build your career with one of our ecosystem projects, keep a tab on our careers page in the website where you’ll find plenty of job opportunities.