Shardeum, an EVM-based Layer-1 blockchain, is powering India’s Layer-1 revolution with dynamic sharding and radical accessibility. With three decades of tech leadership—including stints at AWS, DraftKings, and Game of Silks—Srinivasan Parthasarathy now leads Shardeum’s charge to build the world’s most scalable Layer-1 blockchain. As a 2017 blockchain evangelist, he’s championing Shardeum’s mission to deliver decentralization, scalability, and affordability without compromise. From pioneering Proof of Quorum to launching their long-awaited mainnet, Srinivasan is redefining how Web3 networks scale for real-world adoption.
In this exclusive with Analytics Insight Magazine, Srinivasan shares his vision for Shardeum’s future, why dynamic sharding is a game-changer, and what’s next for India’s most promising L1 blockchain project.
As blockchain tech evolves, do you believe the industry is finally approaching a breakthrough in solving the scalability-decentralization trade-off at scale?
The breakthrough is state-centric sharding that grows or shrinks on demand. When you use dynamic state sharding, you let thousands - or eventually millions - machines share the workload while each retains verifiable ownership over its slice of the data. You get horizontal scale and a broader validator base instead of picking one at the other’s expense. We see the same inflection point the Internet reached in the ’90s when traffic outgrew monolithic servers and load-balancing became the default infrastructure.
With regulatory frameworks tightening globally, how do you see Layer 1 blockchains adapting to remain compliant yet decentralized?
The most pragmatic path is compliance by architecture rather than compliance by gatekeeping. A fully open-source protocol, public tokenomics, a deterministic emission schedule, and a validator set that anyone can join from a laptop already ticks many of those boxes.
From your CTO lens, what are the biggest technical bottlenecks still holding back mass Web3 adoption, especially in emerging markets?
The largest bottlenecks stem from infrastructure that wasn’t built with global inclusivity in mind. In many emerging markets, the challenges begin with affordability. When a basic transaction costs $10 - $20, you’ve already excluded millions of users and developers. Even worse, the barrier to participation on the supply side - running a validator or launching a dApp - often demands enterprise-grade hardware and a high staking amount, which is entirely impractical in regions where people work from regular hardware.
The second layer of constraint is accessibility. The Web3 UX still assumes technical fluency - private key management, RPC configuration, signing unknown payloads - none of which aligns with how most people interact with digital services. It creates a steep learning curve and introduces risk at every step.
At Shardeum, we’ve tackled these challenges at the protocol level. By allowing nodes to run on regular hardware with just 2,400 SHM and autoscaling the network based on real-time demand, we ensure that neither cost nor infrastructure is a bottleneck. But even that’s just the beginning. True mass adoption will require simplifying not just the network layer but every layer above it - wallets, onboarding, user support, and education.
How can EVM-based chains remain relevant as alternative VM architectures (like Move or WASM) start gaining traction in the developer community?
EVM is not going away - it’s a decade of tooling, audits, and developer muscle memory. The opportunity is to improve the execution environment without breaking the contract surface. That means parallel EVM, pre-compiles for zero-knowledge primitives, and gas-price stability so developers don’t have to redesign economics every cycle. Chains that give Solidity devs linear scale and predictable fees can capture most of the “serious” workloads, while also experimenting with side-VMs for specialised use-cases. Inter-VM composability, not winner-takes-all, is where the ecosystem is heading.
As AI and blockchain continue to converge, what opportunities—or risks—do you foresee in the near future for protocol-level innovation?
The intersection of AI and blockchain opens up an entirely new frontier. On the opportunity side, blockchain can serve as the accountability layer for AI. Blockchain’s transparency and immutability offer a way to verify the origin of data, prove model integrity, and ensure auditability - critical safeguards in an AI-saturated world.
There’s also the potential for decentralized AI compute marketplaces - where blockchain coordinates and settles tasks across global validators, bringing cost-effective and censorship-resistant AI to anyone with an internet connection.
But the risks are real too. We’re already seeing AI-generated spam accounts and sybil attacks scale faster than human moderation or KYC can keep up. There’s also the concern of algorithmic exploitation - AI agents gaming DeFi protocols or mempool systems in ways that degrade fairness or usability.
At the protocol level, networks will need to embed stronger sybil resistance, cryptographic randomness, and flexible execution environments.
How is Shardeum different from other L1s? With Shardeum’s mainnet now live, how do you envision it contributing to a more equitable and truly global Web3 infrastructure?
From the beginning, we’ve focused on building a Layer 1 that can scale with demand while remaining fundamentally accessible to anyone, whether you're a developer or a validator or a consumer.
What sets us apart is our dynamic state sharding architecture. While most L1s claim high TPS by running on optimized hardware or centralized validator sets, Shardeum scales horizontally by design. As more validators join, the network automatically scales, increasing throughput in real time while keeping fees as low as $0.01. That’s what we mean by “autoscaling” - and it’s a structural advantage that grows with the community.
We’re also unique in our validator requirements. Anyone with ~2,400 SHM and a regular hardware can participate as a validator (rolling out soon). No complex set up is required, no massive stake, and no gatekeeping. And across our Testnets, this accessibility played out at scale: over 171,000 physical validator nodes and 81 million transactions. That’s proof that decentralization isn’t just a talking point.
In the months ahead, we’ll layer in smart contract support, and enable more contributors to build real-world applications - from DeFi to payments to identity. The long-term vision is a blockchain that makes decentralization accessible to everyone.