Gas Price in Shiba Inu's Shibarium Spikes 2,777%: What's Happening?

An unknown on-chain anomaly has hit Shibarium, a layer-2 blockchain rollup designed for the ecosystem around the popular meme-inspired Shiba Inu (SHIB) cryptocurrency. 

According to data from Shibariumscan, the average price of gas on Shibarium skyrocketed over 2,777% in the last 24 hours. The metric, which tracks the average price (gwei) per unit of gas spent on a transaction on the Shibarium network, shows that this number has skyrocketed to 275.5 gwei, even though it was only worth 9.94 gwei the day before.

The spike in transaction numbers may be related to an increase in network activity. However, this is where the controversy arises, as, despite the nearly 30-fold increase in the cost of transactions, the amount of transactions actually decreased over the course of the day. 

Source: Shibariumscan

From 7,502 daily transactions the day before, there were only 3,802 yesterday. Today it is predicted that there will only be 2,559 transactions, which means that the activity on the Shiba Inu network will continue to decrease. 

What's behind anomaly?

Why the price of gas on gwei is skyrocketing while activity is declining is an interesting question. It is further fueled by the fact that the average transaction fee in BONE, Shibarium's native token, has fallen along with the number of daily transactions. 

Source: Shibariumscan

The answer may lie in the nature of Shibarium, which is ultimately an EVM blockchain, in other words, built on top of Ethereum. But the cost of gas on Ethereum has also fallen in recent days. The other reason may be the incorrect display of statistics, but as we can see, the only anomaly here is limited to gas prices in gwei, and not BONE.