Have Shiba Inu Devs Copied The Shibarium Code?

The Shiba Inu community is facing a potentially huge scandal. Did the developers copy the code for Shibarium from another blockchain? After the beta version of Shibarium was released a few days ago, more technical details such as the Chain ID, RPC nodes, block explorer, faucet and bridge were released today, giving rise to this rumor.

In Shiba Inu’s official Discord channel, high-ranking community member Steve, who is also part of SHIB’s Growth Team, first raised the accusation. The suspicion stems from the fact that Shibarium’s beta testnet uses the same chain ID 917 as the unknown Rinia blockchain, which was released in December 2022.

“Why is it that it looks like Shibarium test net has taken 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 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 just incompetent as your chain wouldn’t work properly and everyone trying to interact with your chain would instead interact with the other chain. Unless you somehow asked the owner of the other chain to turn their nodes off so you could spin up a node with a copied genesis file,” claimed Steve.

As a result of revelations, there was a great outcry within the SHIB army. Queenie, another Shiba Inu community member, 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 our layer 2, have another projects Chain ID?”

Just A Stupid Mistake Of The Shiba Inu Devs?

However, other prominent community members were quick to dispel the rumor. “Kosener” wrote that Steve’s statements were basically incorrect. “You need both to interact with a chain. Your logic would mean that all EVM chains are connected by some central authority that routes based on chain id. That is not how it works.”

Blockchains can operate independently with the same chain id, according to Kosener. Still, he admitted there could be a problem with some dapps when adding both chains to MetaMask.

Another user named “JesusM” outlined that the accusation of Shib Inu cribbing from Rinia is based on nothing more than the chain ID, which is identical to another project. “That is literally the most minor amount of evidence it’s not even funny.”

From a developer’s point of view, “akdadoc” said that there is no rule by which to select a chain ID, other than to pick a number. ” So I am assuming that’s exactly what the SHIB devs could have done.”

Nevertheless, the Shiba Inu community is still in turmoil, especially because lead developer Kusama still hasn’t commented on the allegations and provided a possibly plausible explanation for having the same chain ID with Rinia.

Remarkably, the well-known crypto-YouTuber Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy has also joined the discussion and threatened to reveal the real name of Shytoshi Kusama 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 was involved early on once the two co-founders split. One left and made his own chain. The main founder worked with Sam as the project got off the ground.

— Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) March 16, 2023

UPDATE:

Kaaldhairya, one of the pseudonymous developers, tweeted the following a few minutes after press time:

Dispelling some FUD ever since we did the Alpha network deployment few chain IDs were picked randomly- 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) and these chain were not registered anywhere at that time, I made a mistake to not recheck when the puppynet network was launched.

The developer also added that he will be redeploying a new version of the beta network with a new chain ID.

At press time, the SHIB price was down 9% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.00001045.