Investing

Shibarium Tokens Plunge as Bridge Issues Emerge After Mainnet Launch

Ruholamin Haqshanas

Published: August 17, 2023 7:55 am

Last Updated: August 17, 2023 12:24 pm

Shibarium ecosystem tokens have nosedived after issues with the Shibarium bridge emerged following the much-hyped launch of the network on Wednesday. SHIB, BONE, and LEASH tokens have all taken a hit amid reports that a large chunk of ETH sent to the bridge contract is now stuck.

Shibarium Blockchain Goes Live to Bring Additional Utility to Shiba Inu

On Wednesday, the highly anticipated Shibarium blockchain went live. The Ethereum layer-2 network, which uses SHIB tokens as fees, is expected to provide faster and cheaper transactions for users, offering an additional utility to the popular Shiba Inu project.

Shiba Inu, inspired by the Shiba Inu dog breed and Dogecoin, has become one of the most significant meme coins by market capitalization since its launch in August 2020. However, developers plan to give these tokens more utility through the Shibarium network, explicitly focusing on decentralized finance (DeFi).

Shibarium will leverage a range of tokens, including BONE, TREAT, SHIB, and LEASH, for applications built on the blockchain. Specifically, Shibarium aims to cater to the growing popularity of the metaverse and gaming sectors and be a cost-effective settlement option for DeFi applications.

To further enhance the project’s decentralized nature, Shibarium will introduce a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called “DoggyDAO.” Token holders will have the power to run and govern this organization, providing funding for projects built on the Shibarium network.

Adopting a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Shibarium relies on validators and delegators to ensure the ecosystem’s security and operation. Validators run nodes, process transactions, and create new blocks, while delegators support validators by staking ecosystem tokens.

Both validators and delegators are rewarded with a governance token called BONE, which has a total supply of 250 million.

$1.7 Million Stuck on Shibarium Bridge

Following the much-hyped launch of Shibarium, reports started surfacing regarding bridging issues. Blockchain data shows transactions on the network were stalled for at least five hours as of the time of writing. Users had transferred 954 ETH, worth $1.7 million, and $750,000 worth of BONE, a Shibarium governance token, to the contract.

Memecoin analyst ‘Dzen’ also stated something was wrong with the RPC (remote procedure call) system, a node that runs key blockchain client software. “It seems like the RPC is stuck at block 190015, and blockchain is stuck at block 190203 on the block scanner, that was 30 min ago,” the user said in a recent tweet.

Likewise, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said the RPC was “dead” and described the block explorer as awful. The Shibarium RPC website is down at the time of writing.

To make matters worse, in screenshots that reportedly capture an internal Telegram conversation between Shibarium developers, lead developer Shytoshi revealed that the team could not recover assets bridged to the Shibarium network.

Meanwhile, the tumulous launch of the Shibarium blockchain and subsequent bridging issues has sent Shibarium ecosystem tokens plunging. At the time of writing, SHIB is trading at $0.000009, down by around 9% over the past day.

Shibarium’s governance token BONE has also taken a brutal hit, dropping by more than 17% over the past day. Furthermore, LEASH and TREAT are down by more than 21% and 31% over the past 24 hours, respectively.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist