After a rocky start plagued by software glitches that left millions of dollars stranded, Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s layer-2 network, has finally re-enabled token withdrawals.
According to the most recent blog post by Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous lead developer of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) project, users can now withdraw — via the bridge — Shibarium ecosystem tokens, including SHIB, LEASH, and wrapped Ether (wETH), with processing times ranging from 45 minutes to three hours. However, withdrawals of BONE tokens could take as long as a week.
Kusama wrote:
“It is by design that the Shib, Leash, WEth withdrawals through the bridge take at least 2 Checkpoints (45 Minutes to 3 hours), and BONE withdrawl will take up to 7 days.“
Shibarium is a fork of the Polygon blockchain, and its development team collaborated with Polygon’s developers to address potential issues and prevent future outages. The network aims to establish Shiba Inu as a credible blockchain project, focusing on applications in the metaverse and gaming sectors. It also aims to serve as an affordable settlement layer for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications built on top of it.
The network had initially shown promise during its testing phase, attracting millions of wallets and facilitating approximately 22 million transactions over four months. However, the enthusiasm was short-lived. Shortly after its public launch earlier this month, transactions on Shibarium came to a halt for nearly 11 hours, causing SHIB token prices to drop by 10%. The issue was attributed to an overwhelming number of transactions that exceeded the network’s capacity, leading to server failures.
In response to the crisis, the developers clarified that the problem wasn’t with the bridge—a tool that facilitates token transfers between different networks—but rather with an unexpected surge in user transactions that overloaded the servers. To mitigate such issues in the future, the team has implemented a new monitoring system and added extra fail-safes. These measures are designed to ensure the network can handle large volumes of traffic without experiencing another stoppage.
