The team behind the newly released Shibarium mainnet has denied reports of bridge problems and asset losses, saying screenshots floating around the crypto community are false.
In a blog post on Aug. 17, Shytoshi Kusama, co-founder of the Shiba Inu ecosystem, blamed a massive influx of transactions and user activity for causing technical difficulties on Shibarium, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling blockchain launched hours earlier.
Sharing data from Alchemy, Kusama said the project had allotted 400 million compute units per month but experienced 160 million compute units in nearly 30 minutes after Shibarium’s launch. “Although we expected a very busy moment, we never expected this much traffic, instantly,” he said, adding:
“Our team has been working tirelessly to scale (even though validators were already on autoscale when we made the announcement) and bring up the chain again to an extent that we can handle the influx of our decentralized nation state.”
Concerns about Shibarium first surfaced in the crypto community after screenshots reportedly captured an internal Telegram conversation between Shibarium developers indicating the team was allegedly unable to recover assets bridged to the Shibarium network.
In case yall were wondering how Shibarium is going pic.twitter.com/S5vjTxoMDk
— ʎppɐꓷ ɯooɹɥS (@shroom_daddy) August 16, 2023
Contributing to the investigation, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT explained that while he was unable to confirm whether the assets had been lost, the RPC — the node that runs key blockchain client software — was compromised. At the time of writing, the Shibarium RPC website remains down.
“Give us time to scale […] and then bring up our amazing chain once again,” Kusama said in the blog post, dismissing the rumors as FUD, an acronym for “fear, uncertainty and doubt.”
Shibarium relies on a new consensus mechanism called proof-of-participation, in which validators are selected based on their cryptocurrency holdings. It is designed to interact with the primary Ethereum layer-1 blockchain, seeking to offer more efficient and scalable transactions. Its mainnet was released after months of testing involving millions of users and 21 million wallets created.
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