The moment that the many fans of the highly popular meme-based cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) had been eagerly waiting for finally arrived yesterday (March 11).

Here is what Binance Academy says about Shiba Inu ($SHIB):

“Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a dog-themed meme cryptocurrency named after a Japanese dog breed. It was created in 2020 by an anonymous developer named Ryoshi, who designed SHIB to be an alternative to Dogecoin (DOGE) on the Ethereum blockchain.

“SHIB is an ERC-20 token with a decentralized exchange called ShibaSwap. The SHIB roadmap and ecosystem also features an NFT art incubator called Shiba Artist Incubator, 10,000 ‘Shiboshi’ NFTs, and an NFT game Shiboshi Game.

“Shiba Inu had an initial circulating supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. Ryoshi locked 50% of the token in Uniswap to create liquidity and sent the other 50% to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet. However, Vitalik decided to burn 90% of the coins and donate the remaining 10% to charity.“

Shibarium is a layer 2 blockchain designed to address the shortcomings of the $SHIB token’s host chain Ethereum, namely low speed and high transaction cost. Bone ShibaSwap ($BONE), according to the Shibarium team, is “the native token selected to pay for gas transactions and reward Validators and Delegators within the Shibarium protocol.” And fortunately for $SHIB HODLers, Shibarium burns $SHIB with every transaction, making $SHIB more scarce.

In a blog post published on Saturday (March 11), Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous lead developer of the Shiba Inu project, announced the launch of PUPPYNET, which is what the Shibarium team is calling “the EARLY Beta Test of the Shibarium Network.”

Kusama wrote:

“Shibarium is a layer 2 blockchain that allows anyone to build DAPPS, integrate into IRL businesses, and power projects with it. It is low cost, burns Shib in the process, and is being adjusted as the beta test continues over the next few months.“

Anyone can play with this early public beta of Shibarium by visiting a new website that has been set up for this purpose.

And right at the end of his blog post, Kusama explained why the Shiba Inu team finds it ridiculous that some people seem to believe that Ryoshi, the pseudonymous founder of Shiba Inu, is SBF.

As of 11:02 a.m. UTC on March 12, $SHIB is trading around $0.0000103 (up 1.37% in the past 24-hour period), which gives it a reported market cap of $6.05 billion, making it the 14th most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.