The Shiba Inu cryptocurrency project, rooted in the popular Shiba Inu dog meme, presents itself as a rival to Dogecoin and runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The Shiba Inu (SHIB) ecosystem comprises three unique tokens, each serving a particular purpose within the project.
SHIB, as the main token, acts as a decentralized, community-driven currency that is accessible to millions of users around the world. Having launched on the Ethereum blockchain in late 2020, SHIB has since gained global attention and can be used for payment at various locations, either directly or through intermediary services.
BONE serves as the governance token in the ecosystem, with a total supply of 250 million. BONE enables the Shib Army to participate in decision-making by voting on proposals through the Doggy DAO. Additionally, BONE establishes the groundwork for Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s own Layer 2 network.
The third token, LEASH, has a limited supply of 107,646 and offers exclusive benefits to dedicated supporters of the ecosystem. LEASH holders have experienced advantages such as increased BONE rewards for providing liquidity to ShibaSwap, exclusive rights to mint Shiboshi NFTs, and priority access to land sales within the “SHIB: The Metaverse project.”
Shibarium, a layer two blockchain that is a fork of Polygon, has been developed to overcome Ethereum’s limitations, including slow speeds and high transaction costs. 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. Its mainnet was launched on 16 August 2023.
Shortly after its public launch, 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.
According to data from Shibarium explorer, as of 10:05 a.m. UTC on 12 September 2023, there have been a total of 2,113,660 transactions, 589,704 total blocks, and 1,125,981 wallets.
Featured Image via Midjourney
