Degen Season Again? Shiba Coin Launches Ethereum L2

Popular meme coin Shiba Inu has announced the launch of its Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution.

Dubbed as "Shibarium," the goal is for the network to take over a large portion of the SHIB transactions so that it doesn’t rely solely on Ethereum. The L2 will reportedly help to minimise transactions fees and increase TPS (transactions per second), according to an announcement made by SHIB developers on Sunday.

The announcement also highlighted that Shibarium will enable the SHIB community to "build their vision" into the L2, without really specifying what the L2 will be optimised for.

"Decentralized Applications (dApps), programs that exist and run on a blockchain, are a critical component to the expansion of Web 3. Gaming, Social Media, Education, and Supply Chains are just a few of the nearly endless uses for dApps," the announcement said.

"Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) - just like its layer 1, Ethereum, Shibarium allows for the creation of chain-specific NFTs. Event tickets, items/assets used in games, art and music, and digital real estate are just a few of the possible applications for NFTs on Shibarium," it added.

While it's still unclear when the testnet will launch, developers noted that they are "approaching the finishing touches."

They also added that ShibaSwap, the community's highly anticipated decentralised exchange (DEX), will be moved to Shibarium to "improve the Liquidity Pools and their curves to attract more liquidity, both in regular and stable pairs."

Read more: $SHIB - It’s All Fun and Memes Till You Become a Meme

Still a joke?

While the SHIB coin is regarded as a meme coin, due to it being a Dogecoin spin-off with a huge circulating supply of around 550 trillion tokens, its seems like its community has attempted to create some actual utility within the Shiba Inu ecosystem.

In January 2021, the Shiba Inu metaverse was first announced, offering users an opportunity to purchase a finite supply of virtual land. As mentioned earlier, the ecosystem also includes a DEX, ShibaSwap, a hard fork of Uniswap which offers users staking, liquidity pools and even an NFT marketplace known as Shiboshis, both of which help to decrease the supply of SHIB coins in circulation.

At the time of writing, SHIB is trading at US$0.00001052, climbing more than 20% in the past week, mostly due to the the rally in the wider crypto markets.

However, given that most SHIB buyers are only interested in the coin's Elon Musk-fuelled price action (admit it), the launch of Shibarium would likely just result in an influx of degen activity on the network, at least in the short-term. Furthermore, compared to other L2s like Polygon (optimised for NFTs) and Arbitrum (optimised for DeFi), Shibarium does not appear to have a focus area, which would make it less appealing to "serious" developers.