What SHIB holders NEED to know about Shibarium’s latest upgrade

• The hard fork would be executed on the 2nd of May. 
• SHIB rose reacting to the development buy may face sell pressure in the coming days.

Shiba Inu’s [SHIB] layer-2 (L2) blockchain Shibarium was preparing for an upcoming hard fork, aimed at speeding up the network and making it more cost-effective. The native token rose 3.23% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

The upgraded Shibarium

In a blog post shared by Shiba Inu marketing lead Lucie on social platform X, it was revealed that the hard fork would be executed on the 2nd of May.

Hard fork is defined as a radical change to a blockchain, resulting in the creation of a new version of the network. The changes are not backward compatible and all users must upgrade their network to continue participating in the network.

Calling it a “transformative upgrade”, Shiba Inu claimed that the new version would fasten block processing times on Shibarium, thereby boosting the transaction speeds.

Additionally, the enhancements would stabilize transaction fee variations during peak demand periods, making them more predictable and affordable.

The state of Shibarium

Launched in August 2023, Shibarium was a planned endeavor by the Shiba Inu ecosystem to rise above its memecoin roots and add more utility to its coins like SHIB and Bone ShibaSwap [BONE].

As of this writing, the L2 network has handled about 415.8 million transactions, data from Shibarium Explorer showed, with December 2023 proving to be an inflection point in the trajectory. Since December, the cumulative transactions have exploded 103x.

However, this period also saw huge fluctuations in fees, as evidenced in the graph below. The upcoming hard fork was meant to prevent similar situations from occurring again.

Read SHIB’s Price Prediction 2024-25

SHIB to plunge?

Improvements in Shibarium ecosystem could weigh on SHIB as the two were directly linked. Each Shibarium transaction automatically results in some SHIBs getting burned.

However, the meme coin was at the risk of an imminent sell pressure, according to AMBCrypto’s analysis of Santiment’s data. The supply on exchanges rose steadily in recent days, while whale transactions were also rising.