It seems that the recent news about the lead SHIB developer confirming the release of Shibarium beta for "next week," which probably means this week after the Sunday announcement, has fueled a rise in the burn rate of Shiba Inu, taking it to a new high.
SHIB burn rate jumps 708%
According to a recent update on the website of the burn tracker Shibburn, the pace at which SHIB meme tokens have been transferred to dead-end wallets has soared by over 708% in the past 24 hours.
This time, the joined efforts of the SHIB army have made it possible to burn 7,244,258 Shiba Inu in total. This is the first time this week so far that the burn rate has shown a substantial increase.
The price of the popular meme coin has not been demonstrating any significant progress as of late. Over the past week, since Thursday, Feb. 16, the coin has lost nearly 8%, dropping from $0.00001368 to the $0.00001260 level.
A drop of over 6% has been observed over the past 24 hours. As the SHIB burn rate often behaves in correlation with the price, recently, it has been mirroring the negative behavior of the SHIB price.
Shibarium beta release confirmed by Shytoshi
On Sunday, stepping into a Twitter debate, the lead developer of Shiba Inu and Shibarium — the pseudonymous Shytoshi Kusama — confirmed that the answer to the popular question "wen Shibarium" is "next week."
He then changed the bio section of his Twitter profile, adding a "fire emoji" and "on schedule" to it.
Layer-2 protocol Shibarium will allow fast and low-cost transactions for SHIB users and developers. The latter will be able to build dApps and launch smart contracts on it.
Kusama has stressed that after the launch of Shibarium, large amounts of SHIB will be burned, and the community believes that he was talking about trillions of Shiba Inu.