The developers behind the popular memecoin Shiba Inu have reopened withdrawals on the Shibarium bridge back to the Ethereum blockchain. Shibarium is a new Layer 2 solution built by the Shiba Inu team to help scale the SHIB ecosystem.
The Shibarium team had previously suspended activity on the network’s mainnet and bridge shortly after initially launching on August 16th. The suspension was due to scalability issues stemming from a massive influx of transactions overwhelming the nascent network.
For several days after the shutdown, there was substantial uncertainty and concern within the Shiba Inu investor community, as users were unable to withdraw their funds stuck on Shibarium. However, the development team provided assurances that user assets were safe and would be accessible once Shibarium was operational again.
In an update today, the Shibarium team announced that mainnet functionality and bridge withdrawals have now been fully restored. Users can once again process complete withdrawals for assets including ETH, SHIB, LEASH, and WETH from Shibarium back to Ethereum. The team states withdrawals may take between 45 minutes to 4 hours, with the exception of Bone token withdrawals which may take up to 7 days due to the network’s design.
The resumption of bridge withdrawal capabilities is a positive development for Shibarium, as the network looks to build on its early growth momentum. In the weeks since initially launching, Shibarium has attracted over 65,000 user wallets and created and facilitated more than 350,000 transactions on the network.
However, the news of reopened bridge withdrawals does not appear to have significantly impacted the native token SHIB’s price. SHIB has seen relatively flat trading, with only a mild 1.7% growth over the last 24 hours. It is currently trading around $0.0000082.
Additionally, large transaction volumes and whale activity for SHIB seem to be declining. Since mid-August, the daily count of transactions worth $100,000 or more has dropped 88%. And on August 27th, not a single SHIB transaction valued above $1 million took place on exchanges.
So while the Shiba Inu development team continues working to expand the SHIB ecosystem with new offerings like its Shibacals NFT project, actual cryptocurrency price action and volumes remain muted for now. The community will be looking for bridge activity to help catalyze more substantial growth and trading interest again.
