- Shiba Inu launched its layer 2 network Shibarium on Wednesday.
- However, the network crashed mere hours later.
- Now users fear that $2.5 million may be trapped indefinitely.
Just hours after celebrating the launch of Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s developers are scrambling to get the layer 2 network working again after transactions ground to a halt.
At 11:11 pm London time on Wednesday, the official Shiba Inu token Twitter account announced Shibarium was “officially live and ready to explore.”
But users didn’t have long to explore. According to data from Shibariumscan, the network’s official block explorer, the network stopped producing blocks at 6:43 am this morning.
In the seven hours Shibarium was up and running, users were able to bridge across $1.8 million worth of Ether and over $700,000 worth of the Shiba Inu-related BONE token to the new network.
Now the fear is that those funds might be trapped indefinitely.
Despite Shibarium no longer processing transactions and fears that transferred funds could be unrecoverable, unwitting users still continue to bridge funds to Shibarium.
The uncertainty has taken its toll on Shiba Inu and its related tokens.
SHIB fell 8.7% over the past 24 hours and is down to $0.00000904, while BONE, the token which users must use to pay for transactions on Shibarium, is down over 15% to $1.28.
Shiba Inu is a token spin-off of Dogecoin, another Shiba Inu-themed crypto which briefly hit a market cap of over $88 billion after celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Elon Musk raved about it on social media in 2021.
Since Shiba Inu’s launch in 2021, the project has released NFTs, a mobile-based trading card game, and now the Shibarium layer 2 network in an attempt to legitimise itself as more than just a memecoin.
Coordinating Shiba Inu is the pseudonymous figure known as Shytoshi Kusama, who took over leadership of the project after its creator — a pseudonymous developer only known as Ryoshi — stepped away from it in May 2022.
DL News reached out to Kusama and several other Shiba Inu developers and team members but did not receive an immediate response.
Shibarium is the latest in a long line of Ethereum layer 2 networks, including Base, Mantle and Linea, to launch in recent months.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.
