The internet has revolutionized nearly every aspect of modern life, connecting billions of people and scaling communication, commerce, and information exchange to unprecedented levels. Yet, in one fundamental area, it remains largely unfinished: payments. While the internet facilitates borderless digital interactions, the underlying payment systems often rely on outdated, expensive, and geographically constrained infrastructure.
The initial vision for cryptocurrency, as embodied by Satoshi Nakamoto’s launch of Bitcoin, was to enable peer-to-peer payments. However, Bitcoin primarily evolved into a store of value, leaving the goal of a decentralized payment system at scale largely incomplete.
Existing traditional finance systems involve middlemen, causing delays and high fees for transactions like cross-border remittances and online payments. Even within the blockchain space, many early smart contract platforms faced scalability issues, leading to high transaction fees and slow confirmation times, which limited their broader adoption for everyday transactions. While newer platforms achieved higher throughput, many sacrificed decentralization or security, or were not designed for true, sustained scaling. As these networks approach their maximum capacity, they risk encountering the same issues of escalating gas fees and slow processing times.
The Need for Native Internet Payments
A truly evolved internet requires a native payment layer that is fast, low-cost, and borderless. Such a system must be able to handle not just large “macro” payments but also tiny “micro” payments that are currently economically unfeasible due to transaction fees. The rise of AI agents, requiring autonomous transactions for pay-per-use services, highlights the urgent need for such infrastructure. Imagine paying just cents for an AI-generated image or streaming content charged per second in real-time – use cases impossible when transaction costs are high.
Addressing this gap is crucial for unlocking Web3 for billions and enabling mass adoption of decentralized applications beyond the niche focus on DeFi. Payments are universal; everyone interacts with them. Future generations, who value privacy, speed, and global access, may increasingly turn away from traditional banking towards crypto-native payment systems.
Shardeum’s Approach: Autoscaling PayFi
Shardeum is being built to bring the vision of a decentralized payment system at scale to life. It aims to be the world’s first auto-scaling Layer-1 blockchain. Its core design goal is to ensure sustainably low transaction fees (as low as $0.01 ) even as the network grows and adoption increases.
The platform achieves this through several key technological innovations inherited from the protocol:
- Dynamic State Sharding: Instead of requiring every node to process every transaction, the network is broken into multiple “tabs” or shards. Each validator node is only responsible for a subset of the data. This allows for parallel processing of transactions. The number of shards can dynamically adjust based on transaction volume, enabling the network to scale in and out automatically.
- Linear Scalability: Adding more validator nodes to the network directly increases its transaction processing capacity (TPS) proportionally. This ensures that transaction costs remain stable because the network’s capacity can match demand.
- Blockless Architecture: Shardeum’s design allows for the parallel processing and finalization of individual transactions, rather than waiting for entire blocks to be processed. This leads to faster transaction speeds and near-instant finality.
- Transaction-Level Consensus: Consensus is reached on individual transactions, providing faster finality compared to block-based approaches.
- Decentralization: Shardeum prioritizes decentralization by having a low entry barrier for running a validator node. Validator nodes require minimal hardware and resources, making it accessible for almost anyone globally to participate in securing the network. This community-driven validator network helps prevent centralization tradeoffs seen in some other Layer 1 networks.
- EVM Compatibility: By being compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Shardeum can easily integrate with the large existing developer community and tools within the Ethereum ecosystem, simplifying the transition for EVM smart contract functionality coming in Q3.
Unlike most EVM chains focusing primarily on DeFi, Shardeum is specifically targeting PayFi, a sector with immense real-world applicability and scale. While others have worked in payments, they have often focused on B2B solutions and lack EVM compatibility, which limits developer adoption. Shardeum aims to fill this gap with a consumer-first approach.
Enabling New Use Cases
Shardeum’s ability to provide sustainably low gas fees opens the door for a wide range of applications that were previously impractical or impossible on other platforms. These include macro payment use cases such as:
- Remittances and cross-border transfers
- E-commerce payments
- Payroll for global teams
- Institutional settlements
- Trade finance
- Real-world asset tokenization and transfer
- Crowdfunding and donations
Crucially, it also enables numerous micro payment use cases:
- AI-to-AI transactions
- Splitting bills and peer-to-peer payments
- Direct tipping for creators
- Pay-per-use applications and micro billing
- IoT device transactions
- Per-second streaming payments
These applications are currently underserved because existing systems, including many blockchains, cannot support such frequent, low-value transactions at scale without becoming prohibitively expensive or congested.
The Path Forward
Shardeum’s vision is to become the payment layer of the open internet. By focusing on solving payments with a scalable, decentralized, and low-cost architecture, Shardeum is carving out a unique path aimed at unlocking mass adoption and fulfilling the original vision of a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system at scale.
The network launched its mainnet on May 5th, 2025, with a phased rollout of EVM smart contract functionality and continued community-driven development. The SHM token, designed with a dynamic supply model that balances issuance and burning, is intended to be a medium of exchange with low transaction fees, rather than primarily a store of value. Running a node requires minimal hardware, reinforcing the network’s commitment to decentralization.
The potential to create a secure, decentralized, and scalable blockchain with low transaction costs could enable a whole army of developers to build innovative products that haven’t even been conceived yet, ultimately impacting the Web3 landscape far beyond just payments. By solving the internet’s unfinished business in payments, Shardeum aims to make decentralization truly accessible to everyone.
