Shibarium Beta Testnet, Official Layer-2 Launch Imminent As Dev Details Update And Roadmap

Shibarium, one of the highly anticipated major projects in development for the Shiba Inu community, may be nearing its public beta test and official launch based on the timeline provided by its developer, Unification.

The official launch of the public beta testnet of Shibarium is set to take place sometime in Q3 2022, which would "coincide with the FUND TestNet upgrade," Unification disclosed in one of its recent blog posts. And while the team said the roadmap is still tentative, it noted that the execution of the testnet upgrade will take place a week "after the voting period ends."

Unification revealed that the testnet governance proposal was submitted "during the week beginning July 25" and will end a couple of weeks after the submission of the proposal. The team is scheduled to execute the testnet upgrade "approximately one week after the voting period ends," which falls on Aug. 15, based on the developer's roadmap.

Unification said it "successfully" ran the Shibarium private alpha testnet for "a number of weeks'' in June, and it has allowed the team to "create the necessary support tools prior to the public Beta TestNet deployment." Unification noted at the time that it was heavily developing the layer-2 solution's wallet application.

It also explained that the wallet app is designed to serve as " an all-inclusive application covering two-way asset transfers between L1 and L2, asset transfers on each respective level, staking/delegating, and in future releases, Shibaswap integration, which will also be deployed on L2."

After the launch of the public beta testnet, the Shib Army will see the roll of the Shibarium documentation and then its official release. When the Shibarium is finally operational, it will use BONE for gas fees, which is why the hype for the governance token is currently through the roof.

The Shiba Inu community has been aggressively campaigning for various cryptocurrency exchange platforms to list BONE, the ecosystem's governance token, lately. Even the community's pseudonymous lead developer Shytoshi Kusama helped with the effort a few days ago and asked the community to vote so the token would be listed on Gate.io.

The effort has so far paid off and amassed 4,008 votes, earning BONE the third spot. Other crypto assets appear to be catching up, but people still have time to cast their votes since voting continues until Aug. 9.

Shibarium's imminent release has caused investors to shift their attention to BONE and since the hype, the humble governance token's price surged from $0.3042 on May 12 to $1.06 on Aug. 7, marking a whopping 248% increase. BONE also enables SHIB holders to earn rewards for farming and staking and gives them the right to vote on various proposals for the ecosystem.

Over the weekend, a Shib Army asked Kusama about the release date of Shibarium and while they did not give out any specific details, they asked the investor to have patience and noted that it is still "in the works."

BONE is now available on various cryptocurrency exchange platforms and was added to the crypto exchange platform CoinMerge very recently. As of 7:44 p.m. ET on Monday, BONE was trading down 1.43% at $1.01 with a 24-hour volume of $15,639,967, based on the latest data from CoinMarketCap.