What happened
Shiba Inu (SHIB -2.03%), a meme coin whose developers are trying to groom it into a more useful cryptocurrency, wasn't having a good time of it on Thursday. The new platform that it's a part of launched only hours before, and things didn't exactly go smoothly. As of late afternoon today, Shiba Inu's value had fallen by almost 9% over the past 24 hours.
So what
That platform is the Shibarium network, a Layer 2 blockchain built atop the Ethereum (ETH 1.06%) chain, that went live late Wednesday. Although there's not enough space here to go into the technical details of Shibarium, suffice it to say that it promises to transform Shiba Inu a more effective cryptocurrency, and make it easier, quicker, and cheaper to trade the token.
Upon launch, it was reported in numerous cryptocurrency channels that transactions on the Shibarium chain had been delayed by hours. And users were apparently having difficulty "bridging" (i.e., transacting across two or more blockchains) in the system.
Shiba Inu's developer, in the person of an individual known as Shytoshi Kusama, downplayed the difficulties. In a post published on Thursday and headlined "Shibarium: ALL IS WELL," Kusama wrote, "Our technical difficulty is not an issue of Shibarium, but instead, from the MASSIVE influx of transactions and users that happened at the same time when we announced that Shibarium is live."
Now what
Kusama added that the developers have been laboring "tirelessly" to scale up the system, to the point where it will be better able to cope with this big influx of users. Kusama asked users and other interested parties to give his team time to scale it up properly, "and then bring up our amazing chain once again so that we can start our journey toward perpetual decentralization."
