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Popular memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB) – which is the 16th-biggest crypto in the market – is eyeing the prospects of being a major player in Web3.
Yesterday, 20 December, it was revealed that the memecoin’s new layer-2 blockchain Shibarium has surpassed 150 million transactions, and could soon be launching .shib domain names.
Celebrating on Twitter, Shiba Inu’s lead developer Shytoshi Kusama posted:
Following the recent launch of Shiba Inu’s very own layer-2 blockchain, Shibarium, as well as the announcement of a partnership with Web domain specialists, D3, to launch SHIB domains for websites and emails across both Web2 and Web3, bolstering Shiba Inu’s ambitions for a decentralized digital identity.
Shibarium transactions spike
Since launching in August 2023, the Shibarium network has now surpassed 150 million transactions, which comes as a bit of a surprise considering that figure was below 35 million two weeks ago.
In addition, the number of daily transactions has spiked massively going from around 16,000 a day, to over six million less than a month later, peaking at just over seven million. Just a month after launch, Shibarium hit one million wallet addresses.
With governance, yield, and other decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) features, The Shibarium is a pretty powerful layer-2 is positioned as the gateway to unlocking the potential of SHIB as both a token and community by giving it greater utility.
A top level domain?
In an official press release on Tuesday, the SHIB team announced that they would be partnering with D3 to apply for a .shib top-level domain (TLD) that is interoperable between Web2 and Web3 platforms.
As per the release, D3 will be assisting SHIB as they make their application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
In doing so, SHIB domains would be rooted in the domain name system (DNS) just like .com, .gov, and .net, but instead, .shib would be interoperable and compatible across Web2 and Web3 systems. All internet domain applications go through ICANN, and if passed they get the rights to sell all domains with the desired suffix, which would be .shib in this case.
A main selling point of .shib compared to others is that the users get both .shib at the end of their web and email addresses. It’s completely decentralized too, meaning that it is
Moving far beyond its humble beginnings as a memecoin, Shiba Inu is on a quest to advance decentralized identity technologies. In the latter half of 2023, Shiba Inu. launched its own digital identity gateway the Shiba Name Service (SNS), its self-custodial Shib Wallet, and the Shib Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), bringing robust Web3 infrastructure to its users.
Kusama added: “Our partnership with D3 allows us to scale outside of the existing #ShibArmy and give over 5 billion Internet users direct access to the SHIB ecosystem”. D3 Co-founder Shayan Rostam noted that domain names are a staple of the online era, and will remain so throughout Web3.
This acceptance of the application isn’t guaranteed. ICANN takes into consideration key factors to accept a new TDL, such as public interest, social impact, and community activity. However, if it is accepted, we’ll likely see a flock of websites moving from .com to .shib.
