Is Shibarium Rinia’s fork? SHIB’s price fell after developers were accused of code theft

A hot discussion broke out on the Shiba Inu server in Discord. The reason was that community users claim that Shibarium has a similar source code to the Rinia blockchain project to build decentralized apps. And although the developers of Shiba Inu don’t consider the allegations seriously, the value of the SHIB native token has begun to drop. Read more about all of this below.

What happened

It’s not the best time for such news, especially considering the recent launch of the beta version of Shibarium, the project aimed at increasing the speed of the network and reducing commissions. The project is a big bet, but the news related to the possible borrowing of the code can disrupt the plans of the team.

It all started on March 16, when one of the participants in the Discord channel Shiba Inu, going by the nickname “STEVE,” noticed that the is a unique identifier that represents a blockchain network — the blockchain ID of the Shibarium project — was similar to that of the Rinia blockchain.

The problem is that, according to STEVE, it is impossible to use two blockchains with the same Chain ID. This is because the user simply will not be able to interact with the blockchain he is interested in because the system will refer to a different blockchain.

“As using an ID that already exists is just incompentent, as  your chain wouldn’t work properly, and everyone trying to interact with your chain would instead interact with the other chain. Unless somehow asked the owner of the other chain to turn their nodes off so you could spin up a node with a copied genesis file,” the expert said.

He also added that this Shiba Inu project is very important for him personally because he plans to become the validator of this network, so he waited for more than a year for its release and, according to him, spent about $40K to support it.

Twitter user, going by the nickname “Rancune,” published the screenshots from Discord on the social network. To add to the above, there is a comment from a certain Trophias, who, according to the message, is the developer of the Shiba metaverse. In particular, he claims that there was an atmosphere of “manipulation and silence.”

“Shytoshi Shiba Inu lead developer has created manipulation against the entire team with slanderous lies and manipulation, along with members of the community to do his bidding. There are also people helping him to do this that know it’s all a lie, but do it because of fame, money, and promotions,” the message says.

However, not everyone believed the accusations, so they demanded more evidence.

“Why not find out what happened and then come here, all you guys did is cause [a] ton of fear and speculation, why not find out first and then say what happened,” states one of the Discord users.

Some of the witnesses to the dispute acknowledged that the similarity of the chains looked suspicious, but at the same time believed that borrowing code in the crypto industry is common practice.

Users’ reaction

Some time after the discussion started, Shytoshi Kusama joined in. The developer responded to some of the messages, mainly stating that the current accusations are nothing but an attempt to discredit the team’s efforts to develop Shibarium. 

A similar opinion is shared by Shiba ecosystem loyalist LUCIE. According to her, some people in Discord are constantly trying to produce FUD — fear uncertainty and doubt. This is a propaganda tactic to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

“You know I warned two months ago that this would happen. The same team that claimed to care and work for SHIB is now trying to do as much damage,” she said.

The $SHIB KNIGHT, trader and investor, believes this is nothing but FUD, so he urges users to try to counter the baseless accusations.

Be careful with the FUD. This is coming outside of the $SHIB Community & Supporters. pic.twitter.com/h5i3ROYbb0

— $SHIB KNIGHT (@army_shiba) March 16, 2023

Popular crypto-blogger Bitboy also joined the discussion, where, due to the situation, he promised to disclose the identity of the mysterious creator of Shiba Inu.

Wait until I dox the founder of $SHIB it’s coming this week. Heck maybe tmrw https://t.co/aAKW39I92G

— Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) March 16, 2023

Earlier, the Coinbase director set up a connection between the founder of Shiba Inu and Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried. However, Bitboy claims that the head of FTX, though allegedly involved in the project, is not its founder. One way or another, the connection with the infamous exchange may cause additional damage to Shiba Inu. And it’s not just about the price of the asset, which began to fall after the news. About this further.

How much has the value of the Shiba Inu dropped?

According to CoinMarketCap, Shiba Inu was worth $0.0000114 at its peak a day ago, on March 15. On the 16th, right after the news, the token started to drop markedly in value, falling to $0.00001026. Thus, the difference is 11,11%. The gap is not very big, but given that the token continues to go down in value, the figures may be getting worse and worse.

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Things aren’t going well for trading volumes either, which have fallen 23,83% over the past 24 hours.

Rinia comment

Representatives of the blockchain project Rinia did not stand aside and commented on the situation with Shibarium. The developer of the Firechain and Rinia test nets, known by the nickname KRYPSTEIN, gave an answer. 

He says that the developers of Shibarium didn’t steal his code but used a similar Chain ID. He clarified that all the code he writes is open-source and free. Therefore, if the Shibarium team had taken his work, this would not have been a problem.

However, according to TheCryptoBasic, KRYPSTEIN’s claim is that the developers of Shibarium used his network ID. And he, as explained by the specialist, is a tribute to his late grandmother, after whom he named the test network Firechain. That is, the complaint relates only to the network ID not copying code.

Shiba Inu team comment

Shiba Inu developer Kaal Dhairya responded to the allegations of code theft by admitting that he made a mistake regarding the identifier in the beta version of Shibarium. The team member wrote about it on Twitter. 

Specifically, he said that he didn’t recheck during the launch of PuppyNet for similar identifiers. According to him, these chains were not registered by anyone at the time. That’s why he plans to relaunch the beta version of the network with a new identifier. This is expected to take four to five days. 

“Dispelling some FUD ever since we did the alpha network development few chains IDs were picked randomly — 417 (Alpha), 517 (Staging), 917 (pre-pod/beta) and these chain were not registered anywhere at that time I, made a mistake to not recheck when the PuppyNet network was launched,” he explains.

Thus, the new beta version will be deployed with the new identifiers, which should solve the problem.

How much do you think Shiba Inu will suffer in connection with this case?