u.today
Shiba Inu's Layer-2 scaling solution Shibarium has been in the spotlight since its inception, and it appears to be moving at a relatively slower speed despite hitting new milestones on a regular basis. One major factor that needs to change in order for Shibarium to change its fortunes in the mid- to long term is its block time which, according to Shibariumscam, is pegged at 5.0 seconds.
For a blockchain protocol, this block time is impressive, but many caveats present themselves with respect to this particular metric. First is the overall transaction load on the protocol in relation to the other competing chains.
On-chain data revealed that the average daily transaction on Shibarium is pegged at 11.47K, down from an October peak of 33.05K. For better context, while Shibarium has processed a total of 3,497,383 transactions since it was launched on the mainnet in August, other Ethereum-based protocols like Arbitrum (ARB) and Optimism (OP) process an average monthly transaction of 17.68 million and 8.03 million, respectively.
This figure begs the thesis that should the transaction load on Shibarium grow beyond its current level, the block time might increase in a way that will make transactions clog once again.
Getting ahead of curve
For a very long time, Shibarium's block time has remained stagnant at 5.0 seconds, without any observable fluctuations. In order to get ahead of the curve, the core team behind Shibarium needs to place more emphasis on improving block time from better to best.
As a relatively newer player in the L2 arena, Shibarium needs all the competitive edge it can get in order to beat its peers to gain more market share. Though Shibarium continues to hit new records, it needs to work on its block time if it will be able to dominate the L2 ecosystem on Ethereum in the near future.