Shiba Inu became one of the most hyped projects in 2021. At that time, SHIB token brought investors huge returns in a very short period of time and set a whole trend for the launch of similar “dog” projects.

Just take a look at the chart of the token’s value in 2021 to illustrate. As you can see, the value of the asset has increased hundreds of times.

As a result, Shiba Inu went beyond a meme coin and evolved into an entire ecosystem. In particular, in July 2021, its developers launched a decentralized exchange called ShibaSwap. Now they are preparing for the release of a full-fledged blockchain, which has already had problems.

What is Shiba Inu being criticised for?

This week, the developers released a blockchain testnet, that is, a test version of the full-fledged network. One of the active community members noticed that the test version of Shibarium has the same Chain ID as one of the already existing blockchains. Well, this shows not only plagiarism, but also possible further development problems. So what’s really going on with Shiba Inu?

The problem in the developers’ release code was noticed by STEVE, one of the project’s highly reputable Discord server members. He first explained the simple logic behind the claims against the programmers. Here’s his quote.

A Genesis file creates a blockchain. It has many attributes, but the main one is the Chain ID or chain ID. This ID is completely unique, and Metamask and other wallets use it to determine which network to send transactions to. Chain ID is the easiest thing for any blockchain developer to look at.

In short, an error of this level should not have occurred in the full development of a separate network. In addition, as the developers pointed out, it took millions of dollars and a lot of time to create the blockchain. However, the output turned out to be that the test version of the new network uses an already-occupied chain identifier, which hints rather transparently at the possibility of plagiarism.

Shibarium uses a Chain ID with a value of 917 – the same ID is used by a project called Rinia. With that in mind, STEVE accused the developers of taking the Genesis file from Rinia and not even bothering to change the Chain ID. The Rinia blockchain code was published back in February, and development had been underway since last December. Accordingly, this is no accident.

The problem is not just the plagiarism itself. According to Coindesk’s sources, the wrong Chain ID will lead to more trouble in the future. STEVE has expressed concern about this as well, he continues.

Using an existing Chain ID is simply incompetent as your blockchain will not work properly. As a result, anyone trying to interact with it will instead be interacting with another blockchain. Unless you somehow ask the owner of the other blockchain to disable your nodes.

One of the developers of Shibarium under the nickname ShibDev4Evr has already published the following tweet with an explanation.

Debunking some of the claims about the project. Three Chain IDs were originally chosen – 417 (Alpha), 517 (Staging), 917 (pre-pod/beta) and these IDs were not registered anywhere at the time. I made the mistake of not double-checking when the beta version of Shibarium called Puppynet was launched.

acknowledged the mistake and promised to relaunch the beta version of Shibarium based on the new Chain ID. However, that hasn’t saved the Shiba Inu token from a notable collapse amid investor panic – its value has plunged 14 per cent in the past two weeks.

Millions of SHIB tokens have also been withdrawn from the stack. With that in mind, we can assume that their owners did indeed decide to get rid of the project due to at least the developers’ strange behavior.

Generally creation of new projects in IT world is rarely done completely from scratch and programmers often use other people’s code to create ready-made solutions inside their projects. This is not surprising – and especially in the context of crypto projects, which often feature open source code.

At the same time, the Shiba Inu token itself is in a sense a plagiarism of the Dogecoin token, which was heavily promoted by billionaire Elon Musk during the previous bull run.


We believe that this incident will be forgotten for a few weeks - and especially after the full release of the project's blockchain. While it is unpleasant and even bizarre, investors will probably turn a blind eye to what is happening for the sake of a possible repeat of the SHIB price rally along the lines of 2021. There is a chance that they will still wait for something like this, and even more so given the development of the project, which is there anyway.


Find more interesting news about Shina Inu and other popular coins in our cryptochat. There we also talk about other HYIP tokens that have gained a lot of popularity.