Shiba Inu’s marketing strategist Lucie took to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, 16 August, to issue a strong warning about the potential exploitation risks on Shibarium.
This was posted just hours after Shiba Inu launched the mainnet of the Ethereum layer-2 (L2) scaling solution – Shibarium.
According to Lucie, the reason behind cautioning the public against these risks was because Shibarium is accessible for development by anyone. This is similar to other blockchain structures like Polygon and Ethereum.
Unfortunately, this opens doors for potential attacks. Bad actors can develop scam dApps (decentralised applications) on the L2 platform or orchestrate and deploy a rug-pull of tokens, among other things.
The executive also made users aware that the mere incorporation of the term ‘Shibarium’ or ‘Shib’ in their scam project names gives them no credibility. She then suggested prevention measures to avoid such things like prioritising on doing proper research.
Declaring that safety is “paramount”, she encouraged users to delve into their Telegram and Discord channels, gauge the community’s atmosphere, scrutinise their social media posts, and check Etherscan before committing to any project on Shibarium.
These social media channels will help users to understand the overall sentiment of the project in order to decide whether the same is a genuine or a fraud attempt by malicious actors.
After months of testing that saw the participation of millions of users and the creation of about 21 million wallets, Shiba Inu launched the Shibarium mainnet yesterday, 16 August. It is built on a new consensus mechanism called proof-of-participation (PoP), which works by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This method efficiently cuts down on the computational cost of proof-of-work schemes.
The new L2 also provides a more scalable and cost-effective transaction option as the solution is designed to interact with the primary Ethereum layer-1 blockchain. However, the launch of the same didn’t not affect the price of the tokens in the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
Shiba Inu’s native token $SHIB, Shibarium’s governance token $BONE, and the low-supply staking rewards coin $LEASH have not seen any significant price appreciation since yesterday.
At the time of writing, the price of $SHIB is down by almost 8% in the last 24 hours, while $BONE has fallen about 20% in the same timeframe. The $LEASH token, on the other hand, dropped by about 22% today.
The Shibarium launch also faced a rocky start as reports about a potential hiccup in the same were plenty in number. Screenshots that reportedly showed an internal Telegram conversation between Shibarium developers made rounds where the lead developer Shytoshi revealed that the team was unable to recover assets bridged to the Shibarium network.
