Committer of the Month – Greg Hemmer, Head of Ecosystem & Fundraising

In our latest edition of ‘About Shardeum Team‘, we have Greg Hemmer, who is also the committer for the month of December 2023.

Greg Hemmer is the Head of Fundraising and Ecosystem at Shardeum, an EVM-based L1 smart contract platform that uses dynamic state sharding to achieve linear scalability. He is responsible for sourcing new partners and overseeing the GTM strategy along with developer relations and ecosystem growth. Greg also played a pivotal role in raising Shardeum’s $26MM pre-Series A funding.

Prior to joining Shardeum, Greg was handling Marketing at Shardus, which is the protocol layer of Shardeum. In 2018, he also founded Global Blockchain Network (GBN), the parent entity of Icocrow, a popular advertising and marketing service with over $300K ad revenue from 61 clients. Prior to working in Web3, Greg was the VP Marketing at CareFirst Urgent Care where he was responsible for all digital marketing and patient experience initiatives, and helped grow the healthcare practice from 24 to 38 offices, generating over $100 million in annual revenue.

Greg is deeply passionate about entrepreneurship and enabling the shift from a centralized to decentralized society. Greg can be found here and here.

Let’s Chat With Greg Now

Jereme/Will: What are you building at Shardeum?

Greg: As Head of Ecosystem & Fundraising, I manage Shardeum’s developer relations, ecosystem growth and fundraising functions. The objective of Shardeum’s Ecosystem and DevRel team is to increase the number of companies building products on the Shardeum network and support their success. Our fundraising team sources capital from leading investors to ensure the Shardeum Foundation has the capital necessary to achieve its mission. To date Shardeum has raised $26MM in pre-Series A funding backed by Jane Street, Struck Crypto and Amber Group to name a few with over 150 ecosystem projects. We are very excited to launch Shardeum’s mainnet next year and grow Shardeum to become the most widely adopted L1 smart contract platform in the world.

Jereme/Will: What sets Shardeum apart?

Greg: The pursuit of Shardeum’s mission, decentralization for everyone, in everything Shardeum does from its marketing efforts to technology is what sets Shardeum apart. Shardeum is designed to keep transaction fees low forever so users, particularly in emerging countries, can benefit from decentralization. Sharding is the preferred method to scale decentralization and Shardeum has demonstrated the most advanced sharding capabilities in Web3.

In addition to scalability, it should be easy for anyone to install a validator node and participate in decentralization. Shardeum has achieved this resulting in an average of 19,183 community run validators on Shardeum’s betanet. Shardeum has hosted over 269 events in 8 countries around the world focused on educating new users and developers on Web3 technology. By doing so Shardeum has educated 17,055 people to date on how to use and build web3 technology that includes smart contract deployments.

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

Greg: Blockchain technology will bring a paradigm shift from centralization to decentralized products and services that we use in our daily lives. This presents a once in a lifetime opportunity for you to build decentralized applications on Shardeum that improve billions of lives and change the course of society. You can uplift Shardeum by taking advantage of this opportunity and building decentralized applications on Shardeum. Find problems millions of people face that can be solved with decentralization and build a solution on Shardeum. Let’s enable decentralization for everyone together!

Jereme/Will: What was your journey into Web3?

Greg: I recognized the growth of the Web3 industry in 2018 and felt if I could find a problem to solve for web3 companies there may be a good business opportunity. After surveying 20+ web3 CMO’s I discovered digital advertising was broken in web3. That’s because you could not advertise cryptocurrency related products on traditional advertising platforms like Google or Facebook in 2018. To solve this problem I founded Global Blockchain Network which developed marketing products and services including ad placements on websites such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. Global Blockchain Network raised a six figure seed-investment backed by MLG Blockchain and generated $300k+ revenue in 2018 with over 60 clients.

After graduating I moved to Dallas, TX and met Shardeum’s Co-Founder, Omar Syed, at a local web3 meetup. Omar invited me to join the Shardus project where I worked on marketing projects. After Omar and Nischal founded Shardeum they invited me to join the team full-time. I have never been more passionate and excited for the future than I am in my role at Shardeum.

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