Committer of the Month – Subbu, Content Marketing Manager

In our latest edition of ‘About Shardeum Team‘, we have Subbiah Alagappan (or Subbu in short), who is also the committer for the month of January 2024.

Subbu is the content lead at Shardeum, an EVM based L1 blockchain. He is the first community member to become a committer. He is responsible for Shardeum newsletter, blogsite, FAQ page, copywriting, popular campaigns such as Shardeum is Borderless, and other cross-functional tasks.

Subbu began his professional career as a telemarketer, before moving to Accenture where he made a name for himself for years by expertly managing one of the most complex aspects in Knowledge Transfer (KT) projects – client application testing and provisioning. In 2021, driven by his passion and experience in financial and capital markets, Subbu made a radical switch to the fintech industry. It allowed him to deepen his understanding of financial markets through extensive research and application. The first outcome of that is he DIY’ed and launched an educational WordPress website from scratch. He says the second outcome is still unbelievable!! Let’s find out more.

You can find him here and here.

Let’s Chat with Subbu Now

Jereme/Will: What are you building at Shardeum?

Subbu: I am mainly in pursuit of building organic growth for Shardeum through my content deliverables and initiatives that involve directly working with the community. At Shardeum, we are also redefining content strategy that involves both traditional strategies and innovative ones to tap into the world of opportunities we have at our disposal considering Web3 is young and on its way to capture over 1 billion people in the future. Secondly, Shardeum itself is unique when it comes to smart contract platforms allowing us to explore unique angles in our content strategy.

Aside from routine tasks, I handle Shardeum is Borderless campaign targeted towards non-English (and English) speaking community members and do my part in taking Shardeum global. There is also a quiz for Web3 beginners we just launched on the website recently that has so far attracted more than 40k participants in 4 days! As they say – Content is the king! Content creators can expect several more collaboration opportunities in 2024. Further, we’ve onboarded two interns for our content team so far, and I am pleased to note that both are from within our community. This exemplifies the kind of growth we envision, achieved through thoughtful investments and education. We’ve started off well and I am looking forward to take things to the next level.

Why @shardeum?

✅ Scalability and lower gas fees.
✅ Increased security with unique consensus mechanism.
✅ Even non technical person can run a node.
✅ Shardeum does consensus on each transaction separately. This allows a transaction that affects multiple shards to be processed… pic.twitter.com/K8r7MlV3zy

— danimeister???? (@Dani_OOR) December 16, 2023

Jereme/Will: What sets Shardeum apart?

Subbu: Let me rephrase this question as a follow up to your first one and tell why I am building at Shardeum. Please don’t mind me explaining myself here. To start off, I pinch myself to realize I am literally working for a L1 blockchain – an ecosystem we share with the likes of the revolutionary Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the layperson, this is like working for Google in the 1990s or Apple in the 1980s when they were just tech startups. So it’s not just about yearning to be successful startups but a transformational one at it.

On a side-note, when was the last time we saw emerging and less affluent countries proudly claim a tech company as their own? Well, it’s time!

Bitcoin introduced decentralization in practice and decentralized payments industry. Ethereum took it to the next level by programming the blockchain technology – which was more or less a static distributed ledger till then. After the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin rightly focused on security and decentralization by self-limiting its scalability capacity. Once Ethereum introduced smart contracts, blockchain technology suddenly found use cases in several industries where now you can make and supply products and services with reduced reliance on intermediaries on top of empowering users with greater ownership of their own data. None of the layer 1 (base layer) blockchain networks were able to handle the scalability required for a drastic growth seen by this industry since at least 2019. This forced the ecosystem to short circuit solutions, if I may, in the form of layer 2’s, front-running, vertical scaling (i.e. by increasing the processing power of their servers).

We say public blockchains are permissionless primarily because anyone sitting anywhere in the world used to validate/verify commercial transactions to keep the network secure in return for rewards. Due to the unexpected surge in demand and consequential vertical scaling by networks, node operators were largely limited to those who can afford powerful servers and GPUs. Eventually, that resulted in high transaction fees for average users during peak demand periods.

As we now realize, the only way to introduce decentralization in our societies at scale is by solving the blockchain trilemma: maintaining high levels of – decentralization, security and scalability – all at once on the network. By scaling linearly, Shardeum enables average users to run nodes with minimal hardware requirements while achieving high TPS and maintaining low transaction fees forever to solve the trilemma. Yes, my aunt homeschooling her 4 year old can earn passive income while learning something new not too far away in the future. We are mainstreaming node operation and Web3 for worldwide adoption by making it affordable! No matter how technology evolves or disrupts in the future, decentralization is here to stay for a more equitable world.

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

Subbu: Even though we have multitude of innovations in our protocol, conquering the scalability trilemma is not possible without the community being able to contribute to, stress test and adopt the technology first. With over 900,000+ members fueling our journey, their engagement and feedback are vital in order for us create a product that not only addresses scalability but also truly resonates with a global audience.

I’ve said this before. The journey of building an innovative L1 blockchain publicly is undeniably challenging but we want it no other way. Shardeum has a great opportunity to pioneer a noble and inclusive blueprint for future projects and companies, significantly advancing the decentralization movement. One where the common people aren’t just a participant or minority stakeholders but a powerful architect of change. We know we’ve got an innovative technology, and when you combine that with community-led ecosystem growth, that’s a recipe for success.

Shardians – Gear up!! Continue your great work, keep inspiring, take Shardeum to your communities around the world and get behind the project like never before. It’s not going to be easy but together, we have the strength to overcome any challenge that comes our way, paving the way for the launch of our mainnet and a transformational Web3 company for ages, which is the overarching goal.

And if you are new to Shardeum and Web3, well trust me, you are early! This is a great opportunity to get ahead of the curve compared to most people 🙂 Join us now!

Jereme/Will: What was your journey into Web3?

Subbu: I began my investment journey through mutual funds in 2016 to save taxes. When you are in the corporate world or basically any full time job, you are often left with barely any time for yourself. Shortly after, I read this promo online which pointed out the fact that you don’t need any extra motivation to learn something new to make money. Soon I was lucky to find myself reading a lot about capital markets whenever I got time. I started doing fundamental analysis of companies, commodities, ETFs and understand the difference between the spot market vs derivatives market. 

In 2017, I tried my hand at investing and a bit of trading directly in stocks and crypto (through a CEX though) without having to rely on third parties and pay them a cut of my potential gains. I lost more money than I gained with no surprise there because many of them were not backed by DYOR. In 2018, I gathered quite a bit of confidence to exit from the corporate world but never took the plunge till early 2021 when my health forced me to get back my routine as I used to spend a lot of time working shifts. 

I used some of my exit benefits to expand my research into the financial market including the crypto domain and the underlying technologies such as blockchain, hashgraph and the UPI stack. This enabled me to launch my website and help educate average people that they too have access to financial opportunities in this digital era with an internet connection and a mobile/laptop! I was hoping to launch a localized mutual fund but ran into capital shortfalls. On 2nd February 2022, a higher spirit came calling. To be honest, I was simply at the right place at the right time, with my hard work leading up to that moment unmistakably. The learnings I have gained since joining Shardeum is immeasurable and I am striving to do justice to this opportunity! 🙏

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Note to the community: If you want to be part of our exciting team or any of our ecosystem projects’ team, please do keep a tab on our careers page on the website and submit your job application.