Shibarium Changing Tact, Plans To Onboard “The Right” Validators

Shytoshi Kusama, while replying to a message, now says Shibarium plans to change how the layer-2 solution onboard their validators in light of recent changes that saw the platform increase rewards. Kusama, the anonymous co-founder of Shiba Inu, the network supporting Shibarium, said the plan is to onboard the “right folks to scale” but will “remain quite behind the scenes” as they didn’t want to reveal their complete strategy.

Changing Validator Onboarding Strategy

Kusama’s comments were shared on X by Shibarium’s representative, who claims to be their marketing strategist, going by the handle “LucieSHIB.” When writing on October 9, it remains unclear what Shibarium has in the works to scale. It is already a layer-2 scaling platform designed to scale and process transactions speedily and at lower fees inherently.

Shibarium is a platform that uses a sidechain to process transactions since it is a Polygon hard fork. This makes it suitable for fast and cheap transactions powered by the BONE token. 

To ensure security, Shibarium relies on a web of decentralized validators to confirm that no invalid transactions are submitted to the Ethereum mainnet. Like Polygon and Ethereum, Shibarium has integrated the EIP-1559 standard, a feature developers claim will lead to “more predictable gas fees” in an environment where BONE is deflationary.

Validators must tie 10,000 BONE to Shibarium’s staking management contracts on Ethereum. For being a validator, the Shibarium platform rewards the node operators for ensuring transactions are valid and keeping the network decentralized, thus secure. 

State of Shibarium: Account And Transactions Dropping

Shibarium has set aside 21 million BONE to reward validators and delegators contributing to the ecosystem’s security. A notable structure is that all delegated BONE are distributed to the 12 Shibarium validators. 

According to trackers, Shibs of the Round Table and Burn Baby Burn are the top validators. In total, 25.9 million BONE have been staked, with blocks being confirmed on the Ethereum mainnet roughly every 23 minutes. 

Even though more users are locking their BONE either as delegators or validators, there has been a slowdown since the sidechain deployed. The number of new accounts created has contracted from around 150 on September 10 to below 20 as of October 8. 

Related Reading: Shiba Inu Holders Beware, Shibarium Team Member Makes Critical Warning

Additionally, there are approximately 500 active accounts as of October 8, down from the over 1,500 recorded on September 11. The cool-off has also seen the number of new transactions drop, which lowered demand and impacted a considerably lower transaction fee.

Feature image from Canva, chart from TradingView