Mazrael Defends SHIB's Shibarium, Citing 1,530 Daily Transactions

Shiba Inu (SHIB), the meme-inspired altcoin, was back in the spotlight on August 22 after long-time Shiba Inu community member Mazrael rejected claims that Shibarium, the SHIB ecosystem's appchain layer-2 network, had ceased operating. Shibarium was built to reduce transaction costs and enable faster transfers across the Shiba Inu ecosystem, and Mazrael insisted that validators, archive infrastructure and thousands of daily transactions remain active. The pushback followed a final wind-down update from K9 Finance, a former Shibarium project, whose team argued that the network and its block explorer had not worked reliably since a September 2025 exploit and remain unreliable to this day. K9 Finance confirmed that KNINE, a token that had operated on Shibarium, is being migrated to Base with all associated liquidity. Mazrael countered that a single project's closure is not the same as a network shutdown, saying developer work has not stopped, CCIP links to major chains are live, and environment migrations are ongoing. On ShibariumScan, the network's block explorer, a reset is still in progress and 49% of blocks have been indexed, which on-chain data suggests may leave recent counts incomplete. The latest daily transaction figure stands at 1,530, down from 2,310 on August 20. Mazrael also addressed the DNS and Cloudflare changes made on August 11, attributing them to an infrastructure migration rather than an outage and noting that the explorer has since returned online. He also said the reindexing work explains why recent counts may appear lower than actual network traffic, and reiterated that network-level decisions should not be conflated with project-level exits. Until the reindex is complete, external observers should treat both the block count and the transaction total as provisional.

K9 Finance's exit itself became a flashpoint. In its final update, the team asserted that the Shiba Inu layer 2 “is still not reliable to this day,” citing the September 2025 attack as the moment both the network and its explorer began to falter. Mazrael responded directly, saying Shibarium is not abandoned and stressing that people are still building on it, CCIP lanes with all major chains are live, transactions are still happening, and infrastructure is being maintained and migrated. He also pushed back on the idea that K9's decision to sunset KNINE on Shibarium means the network itself is being sunset, noting that the K9 Foundation's dissolution and the migration of all liquidity to Base are project-level moves. The exchange was notable for its bluntness: in a post on X, Mazrael said K9 had every right to decide Shibarium was no longer a preferred environment, while also referencing a “fake Leash raid” and accusing the K9 Finance account of silencing the Shibarium network's account for more than a year. On the technical side, ShibariumScan's current reset means the visible on-chain counts may be incomplete. The explorer was placed behind Cloudflare on August 11, with a DNS change switching traffic to a proxied setup. Mazrael described this as an infrastructure migration, noting that Cloudflare had handled DNS before but traffic previously pointed directly at the server. After the switch, the explorer came back as a stock deployment: branding and the .shib configuration were missing, and the historical backfill was frozen. It has since returned online and remains accessible, even as the reindexing process continues. The incomplete index could mean the most recent daily transaction count of 1,530 understates actual activity.

Together, the two updates underscore a recurring challenge for SHIB and other altcoin ecosystems: separating a specific project's failure from the health of the underlying network. On-chain data from ShibariumScan still shows a functioning chain, but the 1,530 daily transactions and the unfinished reindexing point to a network whose activity has cooled. For an appchain, metrics such as daily transactions and the depth of automated-market-maker liquidity matter more than any single project's decision to leave. Even when departing projects move liquidity to other chains, the core infrastructure — including cross-chain channels and atomic-swap capabilities — remains operational. The primary-source record is the authoritative signal here: the explorer confirms blocks are being produced, but the backfill remains incomplete, meaning current counts could still understate activity. Whether daily transactions recover and the reindex completes will be the clearest test of Shibarium's near-term health.