DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee - Long-time community participant Mazrael disputed rumours of a “network halt” surrounding Shiba Inu layer-2 Shibarium.

On Aug. 22, blockchain outlet U.Today reported that claims emerged that Shibarium itself is effectively not working after Shibarium-based project K9 Finance announced it would shut down. The community drew a line, saying a project’s withdrawal and the network’s continued existence are separate issues.

K9 Finance’s developers said Shibarium and its explorer have not worked stably since a Shibarium hack in September 2025, and that the Shiba Inu layer-2 remains unreliable. After the K9 foundation was dissolved, KNINE moved from Shibarium to Base, and liquidity moved with it.

Mazrael countered by saying, “Shibarium is not abandoned.” He said validators and archive infrastructure are still running, and that thousands of daily transactions, on-chain work and environment migration work are continuing. He added that CCIP routes connected to major chains are also active, along with infrastructure maintenance and migration and community activity.

He drew a line between K9 Finance ending Shibarium operations for the KNINE token and Shibarium itself ending. K9 Finance can decide it will no longer operate on Shibarium, but that does not mean Shibarium has halted, he said.

Shibarium’s block explorer ShibariumScan is currently experiencing an initialization problem. Block indexing progress remains at about 49 percent, which could affect aggregation of chain activity. Daily transactions are currently tallied at 1,530, down from 2,310 on Aug. 20, but the state of the explorer means simple comparisons require caution.

The issue coincides with an infrastructure change carried out in mid-month. On Aug. 11, ShibariumScan switched from connecting directly to servers while using Cloudflare only for DNS to a proxy-based approach. Mazrael raised the possibility that DNS settings changed in that process could have affected the disruption. He also said the timing of the explorer returning to a “default deployment state” without brand elements matches the infrastructure migration work.

ShibariumScan can now be accessed again, but branding and settings related to “.shib” are missing, and backfill work to repopulate past data was also reported to have stopped. The key questions are whether explorer indexing and related functions will be fully restored, and whether real activity in the Shibarium ecosystem will be maintained separately from the departure of individual projects.

K9 has every right to decide Shibarium is no longer an environment they want to operate in... after their fake Leash raid and Shane's (k9finance account) silencing of our Shibariumnet network account for over a year other than the occasional pumpfun threats on our network account…