Shiba Inu Plans Shibarium's Public Restart Days After Botched Launch

Shiba Inu developers are slowly working towards a Shibarium network reopening by monitoring validator data and transactions days after a much-hyped network launch was marred by network issues and a faulty bridge.

In a post early Tuesday, the project’s key developer, who goes by Shytoshi Kusama, said the network was “almost ready to reopen to the public” and had mechanisms in place to prevent an outage repeat.

“After two days of testing and tweaking parameters to achieve "ready" state Shibarium is now enhanced and optimized,” Kusama said. “As mentioned it is still in testing, but producing blocks.”

“Moreover, we have enabled a new monitoring system and additional fail-safes including rate limiting at the RPC level and auto server reset in case we get a huge level of traffic again,” he added.

Shibarium is an Ethereum layer-2 network that uses SHIB tokens as fees in what is part of a broader plan to position Shiba Inu as a serious blockchain project. It is said to have a focus on metaverse and gaming applications while finding use as a cheap settlement for DeFi applications built atop it.

A testing period for Shibarium saw significant success, with millions of wallets participating and conducting some 22 million transactions over a four-month period.

But last week’s launch quickly fizzled out. Transactions on the network were stalled for at least eleven hours shortly after going live, with millions of dollars stuck on a bridge, or a tool that transfers tokens between different networks. SHIB prices plunged 10% at the time.

Developers responded to the outage stating that "there was no bridge issue" and that the problem occurred following an unprecedented mass influx of transactions from users. They claimed servers failed as users overloaded the network with transactions – much higher than the handling capacity of those servers.

The network was later closed to the public and is set for a reopening now that these errors are supposed to be fixed. As such, developers are already allowing validators – or entities who provide computing resources to process network transactions – to start taking initial steps for the reopening.

“Tomorrow additional validators will go live, giving even more options for you to stake BONE for a share of the rewards,” Kusama wrote in Tuesday’s update. “Testing will wrap up, and we will prepare for public consumption once again.”

SHIB prices were down 4.3% in the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.