Shibarium Devs Say Enhanced Network ‘Almost Ready’ to Reopen

After a rocky start last week, Shiba Inu’s Layer-2 network Shibarium is expected to relaunch with a new monitoring system and other features designed to help it cope with high levels of traffic.

In their latest blog post, the pseudonymous Shiba Inu developer Shytoshi Kusama stated that after two days of “testing and tweaking parameters” to achieve a “ready” state, “Shibarium is now enhanced and optimized.”

“As mentioned it is still in testing, but producing blocks,” wrote Kusama. “Moreover, 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.”

The developer added that the network is now “almost ready to reopen to the public.”

Shibarium developers didn’t immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Shibarium’s embattled launch

Shibarium, an Ethereum layer-2 network backed by SHIB tokens, is aiming to establish itself as a significant contender in the blockchain landscape. With a focus on metaverse and gaming applications, as well as serving as a cost-effective settlement option for DeFi applications, Shibarium is looking to showcase the potential of the Shiba Inu project beyond its origins as a meme coin.

The platform recently underwent an extensive testing period, which saw a reported 21 million users and, as the developers told Decrypt earlier, “sub-fractional transactions cost compared to Polygon and instant speeds.”

However, the excitement surrounding Shibarium’s launch last week was followed by a disappointing setback. Shortly after going live, transactions on the network ground to a halt for a staggering eleven hours, with approximately $1.7 million reportedly trapped on the Ethereum bridge.

In response to the incident, the Shibarium team said that, contrary to assumptions of a bridge malfunction, the issue was due to “the massive amount of traffic” from users. According to the developers, this flood of transactions overloaded the network’s servers, pushing them beyond their operational capacity.

Furthermore, Shibarium was temporarily closed to the public, with developers delivering regular updates on the state of the network.

According to an update issued over the weekend, the team was focusing on “ensuring perfect security measures are in place,” while also scaling and testing the network ahead of the re-launch.

In today’s blog post, Kusama went on to say that additional validators will be joining the network, after which “testing will wrap up, and we will prepare for public consumption once again.”

They also revealed that the team will start implementing the ShibPaper—a comprehensive blueprint of the complete Shiba Inu project and its extended strategy to achieve full decentralization of the network.

According to Kusama, by beginning the implementation of the ShibPaper, the team hopes within this year it “can have more than just a framework, but a working system for governance and management that proves our perpetual decentralized digital nation state is real and here to change the world.”

Despite some positive news for the project, the Shiba Inu token is down more than 22% over the past week, currently trading at $0.00000800, according to CoinGecko.