Kusama Recalls Shiba Inu's Early Days, Puppynet Suspends Activities As Army Awaits Shibarium

The Shiba Ecosystem's anticipation for the probable launch of Shibarium next week is seemingly being fueled further by Shytoshi Kusama's recent actions, as well as that of Puppynet validators.

While the Shiba Inu development team headed by its pseudonymous lead developer Kusama has not yet revealed the specific release date of Shibarium--the highly-awaited layer-2 scalability solution of the ecosystem--the Shib Army thinks the recent clues may be pointing to the project's official rollout next week, with the announcement taking place in Toronto, Canada.

On the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Kusama shared a picture of Vegeta, an anime character from the popular manga and series "Dragon Ball," seemingly preparing himself before unleashing a surge of power that would annihilate his enemy.

Many interpreted the post as the lead developer preparing for the launch of Shibarium.

In the Bad Idea AI Discord, Kusama appeared nostalgic and commented that the number of holders the AI Token now has "is what SHIB had when" he joined, adding they know this because they "made an NFT with 6K copies."

Kusama's comment was backed by the Bad Idea AI chief marketing officer and Shibarium Tech moderator, who uses the X handle @rogspecial, saying, "When @ShytoshiKusama joined #ShibArmy it had around 6,500 Holders. What is more exciting is then he proceeded to explain on How the holders began increasing quite drastically after it reached 10K holders and after it reached 15K the numbers just went to 50K holders and he lost count how fast it grew."

Another indicator that Shibarium could be launching next week was that Puppyscan, the blockchain explorer of Shibarium Beta Testnet, revealed that all activities on the Puppynet suddenly stopped on Aug. 5.

Puppynet is the early beta version of Shiba Inu's (SHIB) layer-2 network, Shibarium, that went live on March 11.

Since its launch, the Puppynet processed over 35 million transactions and created nearly 2 million blocks, while boasting over 17 million wallets, thereby showing loads of activities running in the network. But, its sudden stop and non-resumption of operations fueled speculations that Shibarium's test phase has finally ended and the devs are now preparing the mainnet to go live.

In their blog titled "BONE: The Passport To Shibarium," the pseudonymous lead developer shared that the team "will MINT THE REMAINING SUPPLY OF BONE and RENOUNCE THE BONE CONTRACT so that no further minting will be possible," and explained it was a "necessary step to starting our blockchain, as a significant portion of BONE is allocated to the first role in our upcoming system, the validators."

In the context of cryptocurrency, it means the creator or developer of the crypto asset has publicly declared they no longer have any responsibility or control over the token.

It also means the developer has already relinquished all control and rights over the crypto asset, and has no more ability to influence the token's direction or make any changes to its code.