Shibarium Mainnet Launch Faces Price Turmoil, Technical Glitches

The inauguration of the Shibarium mainnet, a layer 2 scaling solution for the Ethereum network, appears to have gotten off to a rocky start, at least as far as the price of its associated tokens is concerned.

With the August 16 inauguration of the Shibarium network, many Shiba Inu holders had hoped for a sharp appreciation of SHIB, Shibarium’s governance token BONE, and the LEASH token.

However, these hopes have been dashed relatively swiftly. At the time of publication, the price of SHIB had decreased by 8.1% over the past 24 hours, while the price of BONE had decreased by more than 14% over the same period.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) price following the launch of the Shibarium network. Source: CoinGecko

The LEASH token, a low-supply staking reward coin, performed the worst, falling 23.5% on the day. The price decline follows rumors of a possible launch mishap.

According to screenshots purportedly capturing an internal Telegram conversation between Shibarium developers, the team was unable to recover assets connected to the Shibarium network, as disclosed by the team’s main developer, Shytoshi.

ZachXBT, a blockchain investigator, stated that he had not yet confirmed whether or not the assets had been irretrievably lost.

The last block on the Shibarium was mined seven hours ago. Source: ShibariumScan

However, he did note that the RPC, a node that processes key blockchain client software, was “dead” and described the block explorer.

Several antecedent blocks had been mined, but the import was still pending at the time of publication.

Another screenshot allegedly depicted a Shibarium user who was unable to query their bridged balance via the RPC due to a technical issue with the block scanner. The Shibarium RPC website is currently unavailable.

Members of the community believe this may be an indication of a faulty bridge, as the total quantity of locked funds is nearly $2.46 million, consisting of $1.7 million worth of Ether (ETH) and an additional $762,00 worth of Shibarium’s governance token, BONE.