Shiba Inu community divided over allegations of code, chain ID plagiarism

A series of events erupted in the official Shiba Inu Discord on March 17 when a top-ranked community member, Steve, alleged that the Shibarium layer-2 beta testnet and the Rinia testnet, an existing blockchain, had identical chain IDs.

“So why is it that it looks like shibarium test net has taken rinia testnet genesis file Changed the name from renia But forgot to change the chain ID Rinia has been live and owned that chain Id since Feb. And was planned in December.”

Steve also alleged that “there’s no way for it to be taken over without shytoshi and kaal [Shiba Inu developers] specifically having coms with him and asking him to reboot (tricking him) so they could take his genesis file and steal his work.” To which Kaal responded:

“Dispelling some FUD ever since we did the Alpha network deployment few chain 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.”

Kaal then stated that “without getting into any fist fights,” a new version of the Shibraium beta network with a new chain ID would be deployed. However, the incident intensified later in the day when Steve raised another concern, this time comparing two screenshots to show the alleged similarity between the Shibarium alpha testnet and Polygon’s Mumbai testnet: 

“Shibarium GitHub shows the shibarium alpha test is just a 100% copy of Mumbai polygon.”

At the time of publication, Shiba Inu (SHIB) is down 4.65% over the past 24 hours to trade at $0.00001047. Cointelegraph has not independently verified the allegations nor responses brought by the Shiba community.