Amid relatively quiet market conditions, a key metric for the Shiba Inu layer-2 network Shibarium is exploding, raising questions about what is going on.
Specifically, over the past week, the number of wallet addresses on the Shiba Inu-focused Ethereum Layer 2 has jumped over 490% from about 9.4 million on Monday, February 17, to over 55.7 million at the time of writing on Monday, February 24.
The feat is made more interesting by the fact that other key Shibarium metrics have remained low within the period. For one, new transactions on the network have plummeted over 90% in the last week and remain at record lows. Specifically, new transactions fell from over 4 million to around 50,000 at the time of writing.
At the same time, Shibarium’s TVL has remained flat at around $2 million after crashing from above $6 million in December 2024.
So, what’s going on?
Chiikawa
The recent spike in Shibarium wallet addresses appears linked to activity surrounding a memecoin project called Chiikawa (CHIKA) inspired by the anime of the same name. Notably, Shibarium wallet addresses have grown alongside the number of holders of CHIKA, which is around 54.4 million at the time of writing.
Update:
Chiikawa (CHIKA)
Holders: 48,092,361
Shibarium Wallet addresses: 50,228,702🚀🚀🚀https://t.co/UYNAmwgWWC1. Connect to wallet
2. Mint#Shibarium #ShibariumMemecoin pic.twitter.com/2QpOcY8CjZ— WOOF | ve33 DEX on Shibarium🎀 (@woofswap) February 23, 2025
CHIKA appears to have been created by WOOF, a Shibarium-based decentralized exchange, specifically to onboard users to Shibarium.
“This is an introduction to the innovative contract: Aims to add 160 million holders to Shibarium,” the project wrote in an X post on February 16, sharing the contract address for the token.
Unlike recent memecoin projects, Chiikawa has a minting mechanism that allows anyone to create a wallet and mint up to 1 billion tokens. However, its uniqueness doesn’t end there, as 20% of the amount minted by any user is randomly airdropped to 160 others.
While this Shibarium activity does not appear to have any direct implications on the price of ecosystem tokens, including SHIB, a new influx of users can be positive in the long term.
