In a post on X, Shiba Inu marketing lead Lucie (@LucieSHIB) highlighted the potential impact of Ethereum’s forthcoming “Pectra” upgrade on Shibarium, the layer-2 (L2) solution built by the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Slated for release in April 2025, the Pectra upgrade merges two planned improvements—Prague (execution layer) and Electra (consensus layer)—into a single overhaul designed to enhance scalability, staking, and user experience on the Ethereum network.
How Shiba Inu Will Benefit From Pectra
Lucie underscored several benefits that Ethereum’s evolution could bring to L2 platforms like Shibarium. In her post, she noted that the upgrade “will make Layer 2 solutions faster, cheaper, and easier to use,” thanks in large part to innovative features aimed at reducing friction and improving accessibility. She elaborated: “Users won’t need ETH for gas fees when moving assets, reducing costs and friction.”
Moreover, there will be easier onboarding. New users can start using Layer 2 networks without first acquiring ETH, lowering entry barriers. Ultimately, the Pectra upgrade could result in a higher adoption of Shiba Inu.
“Flexible gas payments and better user experience mean more people will use L2s, driving growth and efficiency. This upgrade makes Ethereum’s ecosystem more accessible and affordable, giving Layer 2 solutions a huge boost,” Lucie concludes.
Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade combines multiple enhancements designed to streamline the blockchain’s core operations and bolster its efficiency. This includes account abstraction (ERC-4337) which enables gas fees to be paid in any ERC-20 token rather than just ETH.
According to Shibarium Updates (@Shibizens), this could open the possibility of using Shiba Inu ecosystem tokens—SHIB, BONE, or TREAT—for transaction fees on Ethereum, though actual adoption will hinge on wallet and protocol support.
Moreover, under Pectra, validators can stake up to 2,048 ETH—a major jump from the current 32 ETH requirement. While this increase could make large-scale staking more straightforward, it also raises questions about centralization if a smaller number of validators accumulate disproportionate amounts of stake.
Planned improvements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) aim to reduce computational costs and accelerate execution times, making transactions cheaper for users. This, in turn, could enhance the affordability of L2 activity, benefitting Shibarium and other rollup-based solutions. A new data structure, Verkle Trees optimize how information is stored and validated on-chain, cutting down on node storage requirements and thus enabling smoother network operation.
PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling), designed to bolster L2 rollups by lowering costs and increasing throughput, could give solutions like Shibarium’s L2 an even stronger competitive advantage by improving how off-chain data is handled and secured.
While the potential for SHIB, BONE, or TREAT to become viable gas fee currencies exists, besides several performance improvements for Shibarium, experts caution that wide adoption of such functionality will rely on the active participation and support of wallet providers, decentralized applications (dApps), and broader Ethereum infrastructure. “[It] depends on adoption by wallets and protocols,” @Shibizens concludes.
At press time, SHIB traded at $0.00001329.
Featured image from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com
