SHIB Shows Meme Token Resilience, Hard Fork Expected to Add New Features

SHIB survived the worst of this week’s correction, and even briefly rallied along with Dogecoin (DOGE). But SHIB goes beyond the pure meme narrative of tokens like BONK, SLERF, Dogwifhat and FLOKI. 

SHIB traded at $0.000023, its mid-range level for the past month. SHIB also shows it can rally from every dip in the past weeks, with trading volumes often surpassing $1B. The momentum from the past days may extend and cover the weekly loss gap for SHIB.

Shiba Inu remains a volatile project with inherent risk. But it is also one of the meme coins with the highest ambition to also become a Web3 hub, serving decentralized finance, as well as games and NFT collections and airdrops. 

Shiba Inu Prepares for Two-Stage Hard Fork

Shuba Inu completed the first stage of the Shibarium hard fork, planned for May 2 at block height 4,504,576. The Bor hard fork, as it is known, improves the efficiency of block production and communication between block operators. After the hard fork, the Shibarium network will introduce a small lag to synchronize nodes and avoid conflicting states of the blockchain.

The second stage, the Heimdall hard fork, was scheduled for May 3, 12:30 EST, at block height 3,941,864. The Heimdall fork has improvements for the finalizing layer of Shibarium, where transactions become truly immutable. 

What is the Shibarium Network

The Shibarium network is gaining importance as the native transaction layer for the ShibaInu project. The network already carries more than 1.7M wallets, while SHIB tokens on the Ethereum network are held in 1.4M wallets.

As of May 2024, SHIB is a two-chain token, but it still requires manual bridging from its various versions. Shibarium also tries to optimize fees so that its network becomes more attractive. Nonetheless, people continue to use SHIB in its Ethereum-based version for trading, allowing them to deposit it into centralized exchanges.

The Shibarium network is supported by 100 Validator Nodes. Each node operator must hold at least 10,000 BONE tokens, often collected from the community of delegators. Validator nodes payout rewards and try to retain delegators with favorable payouts.

SHIB Shows Signs of Growth

Shiba Inu is now working to grow the Shibarium ecosystem and turn it into a successful scaling solution. 

Shiba Inu is also going through a fee-burning program, which also indicates usage levels. In April, Shiba Inu achieved the highest burn rate for the past three months, showing an expansion of transactions. 

The project has integrated Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork upgrades and will keep evolving with future hard forks. The network’s growth and upgrades serve to remove the status of a non-serious project, as SHIB aims to have utility and multiple use cases. Already, Shibarium carries several small emerging DEX markets, as well as a Shibarium domain name service, similar to Ethereum addresses.

Shiba Inu Prepares for Privacy Layer

Shiba Inu added a new token to its portfolio, the reward asset TREAT. The intention was for TREAT to work through a confidential layer of the Shibarium network. TREAT is added to the whole Shiba Inu ecosystem of tokens, which includes SHIB, BONE, LEASH, as well as the SHI stablecoin. 

Shiba Inu found additional funding for the TREAT token, raising $12M in April. TREAT also draws in new buyers from other blockchain projects.

The TREAT token launched in 2023 and started active trading in March, when it reached its all-time high. On May 3, TREAT traded at $0.00085, showing its ability to bounce and achieve significant gains in the short term.