The Shiba Inu community is facing a huge scandal. Are developers copying Shibarium code from other blockchains? After the beta version of Shibarium was released a few days ago, other technical details such as ID Chain, RPC nodes, block explorer, faucet and bridge were released today, giving rise to this rumor.
On Shiba Inu’s official Discord channel, high-ranking community member Steve, who is also part of the SHIB Growth Team, first raised the allegations. The suspicion is due to the fact that the Shibarium beta testnet uses the same chain ID 917 as the unknown Rinia blockchain, which was released in December 2022.
“Why is it like Shibarium test net has taken the Rinia testnet genesis file, changed the name from Rinia, but forgot to change the chain ID,” wrote Steve, who further explained that this ID is unique and MetaMask and others. wallet applications use this ID to determine which network to send transactions to.
“Using an existing ID is just incompetent because your chain won’t work properly and everyone who tries to interact with your chain will interact with another chain. Unless you ask the owner of the other chain to kill the node in order to spin the node with the genesis file that’s copied,” Steve said.
As a result of the revelation, there was a huge protest in the SHIB army. Queenie, another member of the Shiba Inu community, wrote: “It depends on your definition of scam, again I just want to know why, we, a billion dollar project that paid $10m dollars to develop layer 2, have another project Chain ID?”
Just A Stupid Mistake From The Shiba Inu Devs?
However, other prominent members of the community were quick to dispel the rumours. “Kosener” wrote that Steve’s statements were basically untrue. “You need two to interact with the chain. Your logic means that all EVM chains are connected by some central authority whose routes are based on the chain id. That’s not the case.”
Blockchains can run independently with the same chain id, according to Kosener. Still, he admitted that there were problems with some dapps when adding both chains to MetaMask.
Another user named “JesusM” confirmed that the accusation of Shib Inu cribbing from Rinia was based on nothing more than ID chain, which is similar to other projects. “It’s the tiniest bit of evidence and it’s not funny.”
From the developer’s point of view, “akdadoc” says that there are no rules for choosing a chain ID, except for choosing a number. “So I think that’s really what SHIB devs can do.”
However, the Shiba Inu community is still in turmoil, especially since the main developer Kusama still has not commented on the allegations and offered a plausible explanation for having the same chain ID as Rinia.
Interestingly, well-known crypto-YouTuber Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy has also joined the discussion and threatened to reveal Shytoshi Kusama’s real name as a result of the alleged revelation. BitBoy claims to have evidence that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was involved in the early stages of Shiba Inu.
Sam joined early after the two co-founders split. One leaves and creates one’s own chain. The main founders partnered with Sam when the project went down.
– Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) March 16, 2023
UPDATE:
Kaaldhairiya, one of the undercover developers, tweeted below a few minutes after press time:
Clearing up some FUD since we did the Alpha network deployment some chain IDs were chosen randomly- 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) and this chain wasn’t listed anywhere at the time, I made a mistake not check back when the puppynet network launches.
The developer also added that they will re-deploy a new version of the beta network with a new chain ID.
At press time, the price of SHIB is down 9% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.00001045.
Featured image from Piret Narep / Unsplash, chart from TradingView.com