The Shiba Inu community has called on Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin to recognize Shibarium as a significant Ethereum layer-2 network.
Shiba Inu has continued to command considerable attention from industry leaders and notable market analysts. For instance, Jeremie Davinci, one of the earliest known Bitcoin adopters, has persistently called for investors to invest in SHIB.
Despite starting as a meme coin, Shiba Inu has evolved into a decentralized ecosystem, securing a spot among the top crypto assets in the market. However, even with its growing prominence, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has often passed out on multiple opportunities to recognize the project for its resilience.
Shibarium Omission
One such case occurred recently when Buterin spotlighted the Dencun hard fork, Ethereum’s latest upgrade, which aims to further reduce gas fees on Ethereum layer-2 networks. Nonetheless, for this to go into effect, these layer-2 networks need to adopt the blob transaction protocol that comes with Dencun.
To demonstrate the current fee rates observed across the Ethereum ecosystem, which includes its layer-2 rollups, Buterin presented a list of notable layer-2 networks and their fees for sending Ethereum and swapping tokens.
The list recognized nine layer-2 networks, including, Arbitrum One, Polygon zkEVM, Boba Network, Optimism and zkSync. Notably, these networks would have an opportunity to leverage blobs for cheaper transactions. However, the list omits other prominent layer-2s, including Shibarium despite its low fees.
For context, an analysis of the fee structures across multiple networks found that Shibarium beats Polygon, Bitcoin, Cardano and Ethereum on transaction costs, boasting an average transaction fee of $0.00001. This places it as one of the cheapest networks to use.
With Buterin failing to include Shibarium on the list, the Shiba Inu community jumped in to demand recognition from the Ethereum founder. “put shibarium on the list. shibarium is also part of eth layer 2. come on vitalik,” an Indonesian SHIB community member remarked.
Responding to this, Ragnar, a notably Shiba Inu ecosystem team member and community figure, asked Buterin when the Ethereum team plans to include Shibarium on the list. Despite the mass calls from community members, Buterin has not given any response as of press time.
Wen Shibarium @VitalikButerin ??? Let’s do it. https://t.co/9uGXcn7qt8
— RagnarShib.eth (@RagnarShiba) March 30, 2024
Buterin Underestimates Shiba Inu
Buterin has engaged in multiple interactions regarding Shiba Inu which demonstrated his sentiments toward the product. When the Ethereum founder discovered that Shiba Inu makes up 20% of the reserves of leading exchange Crypto.com, he expressed surprise, implying he never expected SHIB to make up such a large amount of a major exchange’s holdings.
Buterin admitted last month that he underestimated Shiba Inu when he received half of the token’s circulating supply in 2021. According to him, he burned most of it and gave the rest to charity because he expected it to crash like other meme coins. However, Buterin said SHIB outperformed his expectations
