Shiba Inu’s layer-2 solution, Shibarium, is poised to benefit significantly from Ethereum’s upcoming Pectra upgrade, slated for April 2025. This upgrade combines the Prague (execution layer) and Electra (consensus layer) improvements into one massive overhaul.
How Shibarium Wins
According to Shiba Inu’s marketing lead, Lucie, Pectra will make layer-2 solutions like Shibarium faster, cheaper, and easier to use. Key improvements include:
- Lower Costs: Users won’t need ETH for gas fees when moving assets, significantly reducing transaction costs. This lowers the barrier to entry for new users.
- Easier Onboarding: New users can jump into Shibarium without needing ETH beforehand, making it more accessible.
- Increased Adoption: A better user experience and flexible gas payments will attract more users to layer-2 networks, boosting growth.
Pectra’s Technical Improvements
Pectra packs several improvements that benefit Shibarium:
- Account Abstraction (ERC-4337): This allows gas fees to be paid using ERC-20 tokens, potentially including SHIB, BONE, or TREAT. However, wallet and protocol support is crucial for this to happen.
- Increased Validator Stake: Validators can stake up to 2,048 ETH, simplifying large-scale staking. However, this also raises concerns about potential centralization.
- EVM Improvements: Enhancements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine will reduce computational costs and speed up transactions, making Shibarium cheaper to use.
- Verkle Trees: This new data structure optimizes data storage and validation, leading to smoother network operation.
- PeerDAS:
This improvement enhances layer-2 rollups like Shibarium by lowering costs and increasing throughput.
The Bottom Line
While the potential for using SHIB, BONE, or TREAT for gas fees is exciting, its realization depends on widespread adoption by wallets and protocols. Regardless, the overall performance improvements from Pectra are set to give Shibarium a significant boost. At the time of writing, SHIB was trading at $0.00001329.
