Boxing legend Manny Pacquaio’s foundation adopts Shibarium for operational activities

Former boxing champion Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao’s foundation will be utilising the layer-2 (L2) blockchain network built on Ethereum for Shiba Inu starting today, announced Shibarium developers in a press release.

The Manny Pacquiao Foundation (MPF) is a California 501 (c)(3) non-profit, named and founded on behalf of the former professional boxer who also served as a Senator of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022.

Founded in 2019, MPF has been accepting the memecoin $SHIB on its website since 2021. Talking about the latest move, Executive Director of the foundation, Jon Sisson, said in a statement: “The Pacquiao Foundation is dedicated to fighting for those in need around the world and has already done so for more than a million people requiring urgent assistance. Shibarium will allow us to continue this good work while scaling up operations to help millions more.”

According to its official website, MPF was built from “Manny’s commitment to giving back and fighting for those less fortunate”. It seeks to give communities a fighting chance, empower those less fortunate, and inspire hope around the world.

It also runs a crypto donation initiative where every cryptocurrency received goes towards helping sex trafficking victims in the Philippines and young girls who are the most vulnerable to it.

The latest development comes in as a major boost for Shibarium, which suffered a botched start when it was officially launched in August. Its testnest was a success and the four month testing period saw millions of wallets sign up to the network. However, in the mainnet launch, the network was met with traffic issues. Transactions were delayed by at least 11 hours with millions of dollars stuck on the bridge.

Similar to other layer-2 blockchains, the purpose of Shibarium is to alleviate the scalability challenges faced by the main Ethereum chain. It achieves this by offloading transactions from the main chain, processing them separately, and then providing the data back to the Ethereum network.

The ecosystem aims to address issues related to scalability, high transaction fees, and limited transaction throughput. The layer-2 solution also seeks to enable faster and more cost-effective transactions for Shiba users, enhancing the overall efficiency and usability of the ecosystem.

After almost two weeks of temporary suspension, Shibarium team announced the reopening of withdrawals on both its mainnet and bridge. Since then, it has recovered and now processes thousands of transactions each day, as per data.

Despite these technical hiccups, in less than a week after its relaunch, the L2 blockchain network surpassed the one million wallet mark. The team congratulated the ShibArmy for the feat in a blog post saying: “First of all, congratulations to the ShibArmy for reaching a milestone of 1M wallets and soon, 1M transactions. We have achieved—and aim to maintain—our status as one of the fastest and cheapest L2 networks out there. (I also read somewhere that some people are unhappy that the gas prices are very low in the network, which made me chuckle.)”

At the time of press, Shibarium blockchain explorer showed that there have been nearly 4,000,000 transactions, with a peak activity of 62.57 transactions being set on 25 October.

While the daily transactions figure has come down from its initial launch week levels as it now stood at 13.21K, the network was still going strong. The total number of wallet addresses, on the other hand, was at 1,265,663 as of press time.