- Shibarium mainnet and its bridge has been reopened.
- SHIB’s price continues to plummet as demand dries up.
The developers of Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s [SHIB] designated Layer 2 (L2) blockchain, have announced the reopening of fund withdrawals on its bridge.
— Shytoshi Kusama™ (@ShytoshiKusama) August 28, 2023
After several months of development, the L2 network went live on 16 August. However, its performance was quickly marred by scalability issues due to a massive transaction surge. Also, the bridge through which users sent tokens from the Ethereum [ETH] network became faulty.
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This led the team to temporarily suspend both the Shibarium mainnet and the bridge to identify and fix these issues.
In the early hours of 28 August, the team confirmed that the L2 network and the bridge have been reopened and that “all funds are safu.”
As mentioned in the announcement, through the bridge, Shibarium’s users can now complete withdrawals for assets such as SHIB, Doge Killer [LEASH], and wrapped ether [wETH], which may take between 45 minutes to 3 hours. As for its native token BONE, while withdrawals have also been made available, the process of completing the same may take up to seven days.
Since it first went live, 66,869 wallet addresses have been created on Shibarium, with a total of 368,568 transactions completed, data from Shibariumscan showed.
New demand for SHIB craters
SHIB has seen a decline in network activity since mid-August, and this has contributed to the drop in the meme coin’s value. Trading at $0.000007946 at press time, SHIB’s price has fallen by 22% since 15 August.
Data obtained from Santiment showed that the daily count of addresses that have traded the alt has waned since then. Closing yesterday’s trading session with 3129 active addresses, a 24% drop in the number of daily active addresses trading SHIB has been recorded since 15 August.
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Likewise, the daily count of new addresses created to trade SHIB has dwindled. Information from the same data provider showed a corresponding 48% drop in new address count within the same period.
As SHIB’s price descended, its whale transactions count also reduced. Since mid-August, the daily count of SHIB transactions above $100,000 has decreased by 88%.
Also, the daily count of whale transactions worth over $1 million executed since 15 August has dropped by 94%. For context, on 27 August, no SHIB transaction worth $1 million and above was executed.
The decline in whale transactions correctly mirrors the negative sentiment that currently plagues the meme coin.