Shibarium is “almost ready to reopen to the public”, according to Shytoshi Kusama, a developer on the project. The layer-2 network initially launched last week, but was plagued with network problems and issues with its bridge.
“After two days of testing and tweaking parameters to achieve “ready” state, Shibarium is now enhanced and optimized,” Kusama said.
Shibarium is currently in testing, but it is still producing blocks. Kusama also clarified that there are now mechanisms to prevent a repeat of the launch disaster.
The successful meme coin Shiba Inu is behind the Shibarium blockchain. The hyped Ethereum layer-2 network is positioning itself as an ecosystem that will foster products, protocols and services. It is especially focusing on metaverse and gaming dApps.
SHIB will act as the payment token for fees on the blockchain. But the failed launch of Shibarium saw a price crash for the SHIB cryptocurrency. At the time of writing, it is down 22% in the past week.
What went wrong for Shibarium?
Shibarium’s testnet was met with huge success. The four month testing period saw millions of wallets sign up to the network, making approximately 22 million transactions.
The mainnet launch was scheduled for 16 August, but the highly anticipated network was soon met with traffic issues. Transactions were delayed by at least 11 hours with millions of dollars stuck on the bridge.
Shibarium’s developers said the blockchain’s servers failed due to an overload of network activity, rather than an issue with its bridge.
A Shibarium blog post afterwards revealed that the network “received millions of compute units of traffic within moments”.
It continued: “In fact, as we slowly and carefully investigated where the problem exactly took place and found thousands upon thousands of contract creation and normal transactions IN ONE BLOCK. At this point the amazing system of Shibarium (proudly a fork of Polygon) went into fail safe mode, and stopped to ensure funds are safu… and they are.”
Shibarium’s relaunch
Shibarium eventually closed to the public, but it is now getting ready to reopen. Developers have already started onboarding validators onto the blockchain to prepare for transaction processing.
Shibarium’s latest blog post, published today 22 August, said: “Tomorrow additional validators will go live, giving even more options for you to stake your BONE for a share of the rewards earned for these two roles in our society. Testing will wrap up, and we will prepare for public consumption once again.”
The new blockchain has introduced measures to protect itself from suffering from any more outages.
Kusama said: “We have enabled a new monitoring system and additional fail-safes including rate limiting at the RPC level and auto server reset in case we get a huge level of traffic again.”
A governance system will also soon be implemented. Under the name ShibPaper, it is said to provide “a working system for governance and management that proves our perpetual decentralized digital nation state is real and here to change the world”.
Shiba Inu crashes
Shiba Inu plummeted after the troubled launch of its blockchain. The cryptocurrency dropped from a high of $0.00001 on 16 August to $0.0000076 the following day. This is the lowest price it has traded at since the beginning of 2023.
SHIB has not managed to recover much since this low. As of 22 August, the token is trading at $0.0000079, only marginally up from last week’s low. Shiba Inu is still down 2.42% over the past 24 hours and 22% over the previous seven days.
