The Shiba Inu community is facing a potentially huge scandal. Did the developers copy Shibarium’s code from another blockchain? After the release of the Shibarium beta a few days ago, more technical details such as Channel ID, RPC Nodes, Block Explorer, Tap and Bridge have been released today, giving rise to this rumor.
In the Official Shiba Inu Discord channel, high-ranking member of the community, Steve, who is also part of SHIB’s growth team, was the first to make the accusation. The suspicion stems from the Shibarium beta test network using the same chain ID 917 as the unknown Rinia blockchain, which was released in December 2022.
“Why does it appear that Shibarium testnet took Rinia testnet’s genesis file, changed Rinia’s name, but forgot to change the channel ID,” Steve wrote, who further explained that this ID is absolutely unique and that MetaMask and other wallet applications use this ID to determine which network to send transactions to.
“Using an ID that already exists is simply incompetent because your channel would not work properly and anyone trying to interact with your channel would interact with the other channel instead. Unless you asked the owner of the other chain to turn off its nodes so you can spin up a node with a copied genesis file,” Steve said.
Following revelations, there was a great outcry within 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 10 million dollars to develop our layer 2, have another Chain ID project? ”
Just a stupid mistake from the Shiba Inu developers?
However, other prominent members of the community were quick to dispel the rumor. “Kosener” wrote that Steve’s statements were fundamentally incorrect. “You need both to interact with a channel. Your logic would mean that all EVM chains are connected by a central authority that routes based on the chain id. That’s not how it works. »
Blockchains can operate independently with the same chain ID, according to Kosener. Still, he admitted that there might be a problem with some dapps when adding the two strings to MetaMask.
Another user named “JesusM” pointed out that Rinia’s accusation of Shib Inu rocking is based on nothing more than the channel ID, which is identical to another project. “That’s literally the smallest amount of evidence that it’s not even funny.”
From a developer’s point of view, “akdadoc” said that there is no rule for selecting a channel ID, other than choosing a number. “So I guess that’s exactly what the SHIB developers could have done.”
Nevertheless, the Shiba Inu community is still in turmoil, particularly because lead developer Kusama has yet to comment on the allegations and provide a possibly plausible explanation for having the same channel ID with Rinia.
Remarkably, famous crypto-YouTuber Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy also joined the discussion and threatened to reveal Shytoshi Kusama’s real name following the alleged revelation. BitBoy claims to have evidence that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was involved in the early stages of Shiba Inu.
Sam was involved from the start once the two co-founders went their separate ways. One went and made his own chain. The main founder worked with Sam when the project started.
—Ben Amstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) March 16, 2023
UPDATE:
Kaaldhairya, one of the pseudonymous developers, tweeted the following a few minutes after press time:
Dispelling some FUD since we rolled out the Alpha network, few channel IDs were randomly chosen – 417 (Alpha), 517 (Staging), 917 (pre-pod/beta) and these channels were not registered null Apart at that time, I made a mistake of not double-checking when the puppynet network was launched.
The developer also added that they will be redeploying a new version of the beta network with a new channel ID.
At press time, SHIB price was down 9% in the past 24 hours, trading at $0.00001045.
Featured image by Piret Narep/Unsplash, chart from TradingView.com