The Shibarium network‘s native test network, Puppynet, recently crossed a remarkable milestone of 10 million transactions, indicating increased activity ahead of the mainnet launch planned for later this year. Since its inception on March 11, Puppynet has now processed over 11 million transactions from nearly 15 million wallets. A spike in activity was recorded on May 21, with over 400,000 transactions taking place within a 24-hour timeframe.
As a highly anticipated layer 2 network, Shibarium will soon enter the competitive field of Ethereum-based blockchains, which includes noteworthy contenders such as Arbitrum and Optimism. These networks aim to address the pressing challenges of scalability, speed, and cost associated with the industry. Layer 2 networks, in essence, are off-chain solutions built atop layer 1 blockchains, employed to alleviate bottlenecks attributed to scaling and data processing. By bundling multiple off-chain transactions into a single layer 1 transaction, layer 2 solutions efficiently reduce both data load and transaction fees.
Shiba Inu developers have expressed a keen interest in focusing Shibarium on metaverse and gaming applications, likely driven by the expected surge in the non-fungible token (NFT) sector in the coming years. Moreover, Shibarium aims to provide an affordable settlement platform for decentralized applications (dApps) developed on their network.
This mainnet launch could potentially fortify Shiba Inu’s fundamentals, which initially emerged during the previous bull market as a Shiba Inu-themed meme coin. Since then, the project has strived to establish itself as a legitimate contender, complete with a proprietary blockchain network and a robust dApp ecosystem.
Contributing to this is the market capitalization of Shiba Inu’s three ecosystem tokens: shiba inu (SHIB), leash (LEASH), and bone (BONE), which collectively boast over $5 billion. Interestingly, Shibarium plans to implement a token burn mechanism for each transaction, whereby a certain percentage of SHIB tokens will be permanently removed from the total supply. However, the specific amount to be burned is yet to be finalized.
While there’s no denying Shibarium’s potential to bring about considerable disruption in the blockchain world, it remains crucial to weigh its competitive stance against the backdrop of alternative networks that currently dominate the market. Will projects like Arbitrum and Optimism continue to hold their ground, or will Shibarium successfully capture a significant share of the industry? As the impending mainnet launch draws closer, the future of these layer 2 networks is ripe with speculation.
Source: Coindesk