With trading community turning lukewarm, crypto startups look to rebuild for the future

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

crypto startups, who are looking to expand the scope of their operations to a bouquet of offerings that include gaming, social applications, decentralised financial services and more. Nischal Shetty, the founder of crypto trading platform WazirX, is busy building Shardeum, a blockchain-based protocol that can scale up exponentially to simultaneously support multiple transactions of various kinds, including micro payments and trade finance dealings. Shardeum can support 200 transactions or more per second, Shetty told ET.

“Our ultimate goal is to scale it up to 100,000 transactions per second. We are away from that level, but we are testing our platform to scale up without slowing down,” he said. To put that in context, traditional blockchain-based protocols can perform around 40-50 transactions per second.

With such scalable protocols, the idea is to make crypto relevant for micro transactions, gaming applications, social applications and others. “At WazirX, I realised our customers understood nothing beyond trading. This will not help the industry grow; we need to build for scale, so it becomes affordable for the masses to access services on Web3,” he added.

Mumbai-headquartered crypto unicorn CoinDCX has built a decentralised wallet named Okto, through which users can access DeFi applications from around the world. DeFi, or decentralised finance, refers to blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer financial transactions, which do not require intermediaries such as brokers or banks. “Around 400 million people the world over have touched crypto in some form or the other, but less than 2% understand the world of tokens, DeFi and others.