8 December 2023
Shibarium’s burning mechanism has been in the limelight of late, especially with the recent record of over 8 billion Shiba Inu tokens burnt in a single day. This burning mechanism seems to have undergone an update, which could further enhance its performance.
Shibarium Undergoes Swift Hard Fork
A screenshot containing a discord message from DaVinci (a member of the Shiba Inu development team) surfaced online recently. In the message, DaVinci mentioned that Shibarium would undergo a hard fork at Block 1962000. That suggests that the upgrade already took place as there are already over 2 million blocks on the layer-2 network at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, the main purpose of this hard fork is to enhance the network’s burning mechanism. This will enable support for multiple burn tokens, with BONE and SHIB (the governance tokens of Shibarium) being the main focus. DaVinci also mentioned to node providers that a Genesis update would be required since it was a hard fork.
Further Clarification On What The Hard Fork Entails For Shiba Inu
Shibarium had earlier provided clarification of what this new era of the network entails. A blog post published on the Shibarium site mentioned that Shibarium’s burning mechanism will initially be manually managed as part of this upgrade. This is to ensure alignment with the network’s health and sustainability. In this phase, the burn process will be managed by the official deployer.
Once that is done, Shibarium will apparently transition to an automated system starting in January. As part of this transition, Shibarium is expected to witness further upgrades in a bid to “enhance efficiency and reliability.” According to the network, the automated burn process “will operate based on predefined rules,” although it didn’t provide further details on this.
Node provider NOWNodes noted in a blog post that this upgrade will also facilitate mass adoption for Shibarium. That could explain why there is a need to enhance the burning mechanism as part of the upgrade. Considering that there is a correlation between the transaction volume and token burns, Shibarium needs to be well prepared to handle the number of tokens that need to be burnt following a potential increase in transaction count.
The layer-2 network is currently flying high as the total transaction count on it continues to skyrocket. According to data from the Shibarium Explorer, the total transactions on the network stand at over 58 million at the time of writing. Shibarium has surpassed the milestones of 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, and 35 million mark in just about a week.