Shiba Inu’s Highly Anticipated Shibarium Bridge Is Now 'Fully Functional'

Token withdrawals out of the Shibarium bridge are now live and available to users, weeks after a much-hyped launch quickly fizzled out after being riddled with software bugs that led to millions of dollars in limbo on the network.

Developers said in a Monday update that withdrawals of Shibarium ecosystem tokens shib (SHIB), leash (LEASH) and wrapped ether (wETH) will take anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours to be processed, while bone (BONE) withdrawals could take up to 7 days.

As such, chief developer Shytoshi Kusama previously stated the team had put steps in place to prevent an outage from repeating. They added the team worked with Polygon blockchain developers to rectify any potential issues. Shibarium is a fork of Polygon, meaning it uses modified code that runs the latter.

Shibarium is an Ethereum layer-2 network that uses SHIB tokens as fees in what is part of a broader plan to position Shiba Inu as a serious blockchain project. It is said to have a focus on metaverse and gaming applications while finding use as a cheap settlement for DeFi applications built atop it.

A testing period for Shibarium saw significant success, with millions of wallets participating and conducting some 22 million transactions over a four-month period.

But the network quickly fizzled out after going live earlier this month. Shibarium transactions were stalled for at least eleven hours shortly after going live, with millions of dollars stuck on a bridge, or a tool that transfers tokens between different networks. SHIB prices plunged 10% at the time.

Developers responded to the outage stating that "there was no bridge issue" and that the problem occurred following an unprecedented mass influx of transactions from users, as previously reported. They claimed servers failed as users overloaded the network with transactions – much higher than the handling capacity of those servers.

They have since claimed the network has a “new monitoring system and additional fail-safes” in place to prevent stoppage amid a “huge level of traffic again.”

SHIB slid 2.2% in the past 24 hours despite the network restart amid a generally bearish sentiment for majors such as bitcoin (BTC).