Key Highlights
- High-risk expansion: WazirX rolls out 20x leveraged futures and a memecoin launchpad despite unresolved user fund recovery.
- Unpaid dues linger: Around 15% of user balances remain locked in Recovery Tokens after the $230M hack, with no clear buyback progress.
- Conflict concerns grow: Multiple integrations tied to the same founder raise questions about transparency, priorities, and user trust.
WazirX has had a busy March. On March 13, the exchange published a step-by-step guide for its newly launched crypto futures product, offering INR-denominated perpetual contracts with leverage of up to 20x.
A day later, it posted on X inviting users to try the product through early access before a wider rollout.
Then came the second announcement. WazirX revealed a partnership with Sikka.fun, a mobile-first platform that lets anyone create and trade tokens without technical expertise. The platform runs on Shardeum, a Layer 1 blockchain co-founded by Nischal Shetty, the same person who founded and continues to lead WazirX.
As part of the partnership, the first 1,000 WazirX users who generate a “Sikka Key” through their app settings and verify on the Sikka.fun Android app will receive 50,000 SHM tokens each.
At current market prices, SHM trades at approximately $0.00009 per token. That puts the value of each 50,000 SHM airdrop at roughly $4.50, or about INR 375. The token has fallen over 99.9% from its all-time high of $0.37, recorded in May 2025.
Shardeum’s total market cap sits below $1 million. The 24-hour trading volume across all exchanges hovers around $250,000 to $350,000.
Those are the facts. Now, the questions.
When one founder’s projects keep feeding into each other
Nischal Shetty is the Co-Founder of WazirX. He is also the Co-Founder of Shardeum, the blockchain on which Sikka.fun operates. In February 2024, he co-launched Pi42, a crypto-INR perpetual futures exchange, the same product category WazirX has now entered with its own futures launch.
So, in the span of a few weeks, WazirX has: listed SHM (Shetty’s Shardeum token) on its exchange, run a 52.9 million SHM trading contest called “Highest Trader Kaun” (which roughly translates to ‘Who is the highest trader’) with Shardeum-sponsored prizes, launched futures trading that competes directly with Shetty’s other venture Pi42, and now partnered with Sikka.fun, a platform that exists on Shetty’s Shardeum chain and whose activity generates SHM gas fees that flow back into the Shardeum ecosystem.
Each of these is technically a separate business decision. Together, they form a loop. WazirX lists Shetty’s token. WazirX runs Shardeum-sponsored contests that incentivize volume on that token. WazirX partners with a platform built on Shetty’s chain that requires users to hold and spend SHM. And WazirX’s 16 million registered users become the distribution channel for all of it.
There has been no public disclosure from WazirX about how its commercial relationship with Shardeum is structured, whether Shardeum is paying for these integrations, or whether the revenue generated from SHM-related trading activity on WazirX contributes in any way to the Recovery Token buyback pool.
That absence of clarity is the issue. Not the partnership itself.
What Sikka.fun actually is
Sikka.fun allows anyone to create a token with a fixed supply of 1 billion coins, with 70% going into a public bonding curve for trading, 20% reserved for DEX liquidity, and 10% for on-chain referral rewards. Coin creators earn 0.5% of every trade in SHM, paid automatically. They also serve as the default referrer, earning 2% in coins on purchases made without a referral link.
The model is not new. It follows the template popularized globally by Pump.fun on Solana, which became known for enabling a wave of memecoin creation, many of which lost most of their value within hours of launch. Sikka.fun adapts the same concept for Indian users on a mobile-first app, built on Shardeum.
Shardeum’s own blog describes Sikka.fun as a platform designed for “experimentation across regions, languages, and communities” with “no cost to create coins” and the ability to “start small.” The pitch is its accessibility. But the reality is that platforms built on this model have historically produced far more losses than gains for participants, particularly those who join after early activity has already set prices.
The 50,000 SHM airdrop per user, worth under $5 at current prices, is enough to cover gas fees and some initial participation on the platform. It is not a meaningful financial incentive. What it does accomplish is onboarding WazirX users into the Shardeum ecosystem, generating on-chain activity, and creating demand for SHM, even if marginal, at a time when the token is trading near its all-time low with a market cap under $1 million.
The Shardeum Foundation’s own disclaimer on the airdrop page states it “does not endorse or guarantee the partner’s products, services, or offerings.” A curious framing, given that WazirX and Shardeum share the same Co-Founder.
The $230 million that still hangs over everything
None of this happens in a vacuum. WazirX was hit by a cyberattack in July 2024 that drained approximately $230 million from its multisignature wallet. The breach, attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, wiped out nearly 45% of the exchange’s reserves and froze funds for 4.4 million users.
The exchange was shut down for 16 months. A restructuring process played out in Singapore courts. A “socialized loss” model distributed the impact across all users, including those whose tokens were never stolen. The Singapore High Court sanctioned the scheme in October 2025. Trading resumed on October 24.
Users got back roughly 85% of their pre-hack balances. The remaining 15% was converted into Recovery Tokens (RTs), credited in January 2026. Those tokens are not tradable, not withdrawable, and their value is tied to WazirX generating at least $10 million in recoverable value per quarter through profits or asset recovery. Only about $3 million of the $230 million stolen has been frozen to date.
Shetty himself acknowledged the scale of the challenge in a public interview, saying the exchange would need to generate $235 million in revenue over three years to make Recovery Token holders whole, and that “$235 million is not loose change.”
Meanwhile, questions around Shetty’s own conduct post-hack have continued to surface. The Crypto Times previously reported that Shetty transferred 100% shares of a WazirX-linked company to his wife just weeks after the breach, without public disclosure.
He has also faced criticism for promoting Shardeum while WazirX users awaited court decisions on their frozen funds, and for questioning the community on why they didn’t warn the exchange about storing 45% of reserves in a single wallet.
It is against this background that WazirX is now asking users to engage with a leveraged futures product and a memecoin launchpad, both of which generate revenue and activity for ventures connected to the same founder.
The ZERO controversy has not been forgotten
The Sikka.fun partnership and the futures launch also arrive in the shadow of the WazirX ZERO subscription controversy from December 2025. Users alleged they were auto-enrolled into a paid plan without consent. In cases where there was no INR balance, the exchange reportedly sold users’ lowest-value tokens to cover the charge. Dormant accounts, some untouched since the hack, were billed.
WazirX pointed to blog posts and emails as evidence of prior communication. Users on X described it as a “dark pattern.” The exchange did not publicly confirm whether ZERO subscription revenue would be used for Recovery Token buybacks.
That question now extends to the new products. Will futures trading fees flow into the recovery pool? Will any revenue from the Sikka.fun partnership or Shardeum-related activity on WazirX be earmarked for pending obligations? These are not unreasonable questions for an exchange that has built its post-hack identity around the “Restructure, Restart, Rebuild” framework.
No regulatory safety net for any of this
Crypto futures in India sit outside Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI’s) regulatory perimeter. There are no circuit breakers, no settlement guarantees, no investor protection fund for crypto derivatives. The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) registration that WazirX carries covers anti-money laundering compliance, not market conduct in leveraged products.
The Finance Ministry is reportedly in discussions with SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to build a comprehensive framework. Until that arrives, crypto futures and token launchpads operate without the safeguards that Indian participants are accustomed to in traditional markets.
For context, SEBI recently tightened norms for equity F&O trading, raising lot sizes and margin requirements to protect retail investors from excessive leverage. The direction of Indian regulation is toward tighter controls on derivatives. WazirX is moving in the opposite direction, offering 20x leverage and a token creation tool, to a user base that includes millions of people who have already lost money on the same platform.
The pattern
Here is what WazirX’s timeline looks like since October 2025:
- October 2025: Trading restarts with 85% of balances restored.
- November 2025: WazirX ZERO subscription launches, auto-enrollment backlash follows within weeks.
- January 2026: Recovery Tokens credited to users, untradable, tied to future profits.
- February 2026: SHM listed on WazirX, 52.9 million SHM trading contest launched with Shardeum-sponsored prizes.
- March 2026: Futures trading goes live with 20x leverage. Sikka.fun partnership announced, routing WazirX users into the Shardeum ecosystem.
In that same period, of the $230 million stolen, roughly $3 million has been frozen. No Recovery Token buyback has been publicly reported. The promised DEX meant to generate revenue for creditors has not launched. And SHM, the token now being airdropped and contest-promoted through WazirX, has lost 60% since its listing and over 99% since its all-time high.
New products keep shipping. Old promises keep waiting. And the founder’s other ventures keep appearing in WazirX’s product announcements.
None of this makes WazirX’s moves illegal, and that should be said clearly. Exchanges partner with ecosystem projects. They list tokens. They launch features. These are normal business activities. But normalcy requires a foundation of trust, and WazirX spent most of that foundation in July 2024. Rebuilding it takes more than new products. It takes answers to the questions that keep piling up alongside the product launches.
The gap between what WazirX is building and what it still owes is not closing. It is widening. And until the exchange addresses that gap with the same urgency it brings to product rollouts, every new announcement will carry the same unspoken footnote: what about the money?
Also Read: After WazirX & CoinDCX, CoinSwitch Enters India’s Crypto Zero-Fee Battle
