Shiba Inu lead developer Shytoshi Kusama released a statement on Thursday, August 17, addressing the reported technical difficulty of the Shibarium bridge to the Ethereum network. 

On Wednesday, the Shiba Inu team finally launched the mainnet of the much-anticipated Ethereum layer 2 solution. However, a few hours after launch, reports stated that the Shibarium bridge, designed to enable the seamless bidirectional transfer of assets with Ethereum, had become inoperative.

According to a post by Whale Chart on X, more than $1.7 million worth of ETH was stuck in the Shibarium bridge when this fault developed. 

No Bridge Issue, All Is Well, Kusama Says

In a letter addressed to the Shibarmy – a nickname for Shiba Inu’s supporters – Shytoshi Kusama began by stating, “there was no issue with the Shibarium bridge and all users’ assets were safe.” 

Shortly after reports emerged on the Shibarium’s bridge issue, a screenshot was circulated on X, with a text allegedly from Kusama suggesting the assets stuck on the Shibarium bridge were “unretrievable.” Kusama also dismissed the legibility of any screenshot. 

$1.7M+ worth of $ETH transferred to Shib’s Layer 2 bridge, known as ‘Shibarium,’ is reportedly irretrievable. pic.twitter.com/lLDXsNvAx9

— Ahmad (@Ahmadrobert_) August 17, 2023

The Shiba Inu lead developer admitted there was a technical difficulty but not one of Shibarium’s designs. He stated that the issue experienced by users of the Shibarium bridge was driven by “network congestion” that occurred upon the announcement of the Shibarium mainnet going live. 

The Shiba Inu lead developer said:

Our technical difficulty is not an issue of Shibarium, but instead, from the MASSIVE influx of transactions and users that happened at the same time when we announced that Shibarium is live.

The Shiba Inu team is currently working on scaling the network to accommodate the activity of a “decentralized nation-state” like the Shiba Inu community, according to Kusama.

Shibarium Achieves Over 160 Million Compute Units In Half An Hour

To support his explanation of Shibarium’s technical challenge, Kusama introduced data from Alchemy, one of the analytics services contracted with the Shiba Inu network.

He stated that the Shibarium project is allocated 400 million compute units per month by Alchemy. However, upon the project’s mainnet launch, it exceeded 160 million compute units within an estimated 30 minutes.

For context, compute units refer to the computational resources required to execute smart contracts or perform other tasks on the blockchain.

According to the Shiba Inu developer, if Shibarium kept moving at that rate, it could achieve billions of compute units daily, equating the same performance with the most active layer 2 solutions currently operating. 

Kusama shared some good news with the Shibarmy to round off his address, stating that over 1000 ETH and 600,000 BONE were transferred to Shibarium within 15 minutes. 

Finally, Shytoshi Kusama appealed for more time to scale up Shibarium while reminding the Shibarmy to “ignore all fud” and avoid any site links not associated with Shibainu’s official site, shib.io.

At the time of writing, SHIB, Shiba Inu’s largest native token, is trading at $0.000008639, having gone down by 11.70% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.