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Shiba Inu’s much-anticipated Layer-2 solution, Shibarium, officially launched on mainnet on Wednesday. However, the debut was not without controversy.

As of press time, the Shib mainnet RPC, which can be accessed via https://www.shibrpc.com, is currently down. This has caused concern in the cryptocurrency community, especially considering the large amount of Ethereum (ETH) locked in the Shibarium cross-chain bridge.

According to Beosin’s monitoring, transactions on Shibarium are pending. Currently, a staggering $1.7 million worth of ETH is locked on the Shibarium cross-chain bridge, and Beosin recommends that users temporarily stop any activities on Shibarium.

Prior to this, the Shibarium testnet had over 21 million wallet addresses created, indicating high interest and activity ahead of the mainnet launch.

Adding to the uncertainty is an unverified message circulating on social media purportedly from Shiba Inu founder Shytoshi Kusama that reads: "We screwed up. We can't even get the ETH bridge back." The authenticity of the purported internal Telegram chat message has not been verified by USA TODAY.

The technical failure directly affected the market performance of Shiba Inu. According to CoinGecko data, the price of SHIB plummeted and is currently trading at $0.00000931, a drop of 6.7%.

Reactions to the failed launch have been heated on social media. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have taken to platforms like X to voice their skepticism and mock the situation. Comments range from suggesting alternative blockchain solutions to outright declaring Shibarium dead just hours after its launch. As the SHIB community awaits further clarification, Shytoshi Kusama has yet to make an official statement addressing the controversy after spending months promoting Shibarium’s launch.