Shiba Inu (SHIB) Developer Kaal Dhairya Ends 2-Month X Silence on Shibarium Upkeep

Who Pays for Shibarium?

Shiba Inu (SHIB) developer Kaal Dhairya ended more than two months of public silence on Friday, Oct. 2, with a two-word answer to a question about who pays for Shibarium: “Yours truly.” The reply, posted on X, states in Dhairya's own words that he personally carries the network's maintenance load. It gave no expense figure, no budget line and no long-term funding structure, so its practical content is narrow: the upkeep has a named payer, and that payer is one of the project's core engineers.

@kaaldhairya · X post

Posted on X.

View on X

The question that drew him out came from X user Ed Salomons, who asked who funds the hardening, updates and ongoing maintenance of the network, and pointed to the shutdown of another layer-2 chain as the reason to ask. The network behind the memecoin has faced this kind of scrutiny before, but never with a shutdown case sitting directly beside it. Dhairya's answer arrived the very same day and stopped at attribution: it does not say whether the spending runs into thousands or millions, which entities share the load, or how the cost is funded over time.

The reply matters for a second reason. Dhairya's previous post on X dates to July 25, when he reacted to a rise in the Shiba Inu price, and after that one of the project's most visible developers went quiet. Lead ambassador Shytoshi Kusama has been quieter still, with no post or interaction on X since May 13. Two of the Shiba Inu ecosystem's central stewards thus spent the summer off-platform while the network they maintain kept shipping code, and Friday's one-liner is the first public word from either in months. Silence from the top of a brand-driven asset carries its own cost, and a single reply does not restore a publishing cadence.

Blast's Wind-Down Reframes the Debate

The chain Dhairya was asked about is Blast, a layer-2 network that settles to Ethereum's Layer 1. Blast announced it would wind down operations because operating costs exceeded revenue and the project saw no credible path to economic sustainability; users have until Oct. 26 to withdraw assets through its interface. The case showed that running a chain takes more than engineering: someone has to fund hardware, upgrades and incident response for as long as the network lives, a squeeze now confronting altcoin networks across the sector.

On the maintenance side, Shibarium's own record looks active. An update attributed to Dhairya said a chain reorganization had been resolved, with the remaining step being DRPC's completion of its move to the network's new environment. In late 2025, the old public RPC endpoints were switched off as part of a migration to a new, official and more decentralized RPC infrastructure. Last month, community member Mazrael told node operators to rotate peers after new Bor static nodes and Heimdall persistent_peers were published, leaving the old set obsolete, and the network's RPC listing was refreshed in the ethereum-lists/chains registry, with updated connection details on Chainlist.

The official node documentation describes a two-part stack: Bor, which executes transactions, and Heimdall, which manages the network's delegated proof of stake validation set. Operators need 16 to 64 GB of RAM and at least 1 TB of storage depending on node type, so the compute bill alone is nontrivial. What the documentation does not show is money. No public revenue or expense figure exists for Shibarium, and Dhairya's reply added none, which means Blast's finances cannot be projected onto it: different treasury, different cost base, and no published burn rate on either side.

The Unanswered Cost Math

COINOTAG's reading: the reply settles ownership of the bill, not its size. The Shibariumscan explorer reports the chain 54% reindexed, the RPC plumbing was rebuilt within the past year, and the node documentation is current, so the infrastructure side looks maintained. What nobody has published is the economics, the exact gap that sank Blast. Until a figure appears, the defensible posture for holders is DYOR: treat “Yours truly” as accountability without accounting. The token side runs its own agenda in parallel, with our recent report tracking SHIB's zero removal drive toward a $7.14 billion market cap. As color, our live spot monitoring shows Shiba Inu (SHIB) down 3.4% over the past 24 hours, with exchange holdings near 88 trillion tokens.