SHIB is down 8% as millions of funds have been unstaked amid allegations of Shibarium code theft.
What is a number?
For the community around the SHIB token and the Shibarium blockchain, the difference between code being plagiarized and open source code being recycled is a matter of debate.
The drama began on Thursday, Asia time, when a veteran member of its Discord pointed to the Shibarium chain using the same chain ID number 917 as the Rinia Testnet chain.
While Discord members were quick to offer their own explanations for the similarities, with some panic-selling the token, pushing it down by 10%, the developers behind the Shibarium chain had a much more modest explanation.
“Few chain IDs were picked randomly - 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) which were not registered anywhere at that time, I made a mistake of not rechecking when puppynet network was launched,” tweeted Kaaldhairya, one of the anonymous developers.
Kaaldhairya tweeted that they will be “re-deploying a new version of the BETA network with a new chain ID.”
“New deployments will be rare in the future, but possible, as we are still in the BETA phase,” he continued.
Others pointed out similarities in code found on the code repository Github.
Coders often reuse each other's work to complete mundane and benign tasks. These pre-written blocks are called libraries and are available as open source code. That is, code that is designed to be copied and reused.
Andrew Angrisani, a member of the project’s Telegram community and its Discord and a crypto security engineer, explained the code similarities with Rinia and Shibarium, which use the same open source code.
“Both Rinia TestNet and Shibarium copied open source code for their block explorers called Blockscout and were likely lazy in their implementation,” he said.
Another senior community member, JesusM, called this all “small mistakes made on the beta.” JesusM said this is the point of the testing process.
“Bugs are tested and then fixed,” they said.
Angrisani speculates that part of the reason may be a ploy to drum up free marketing for Rinia and upcoming projects.
“Rinia Testnet chain Dev will launch a Firechain ICO called Shib Killer on March 31st. Since the ChainID is the same, they may be using the mud in the water to advocate free marketing,” he said. “It may be a product of copying source code from an open source project.”
This isn’t the first time it’s been accused either. In February, someone on Discord raised questions about the similarities between Shibarium and Rinia.
“The bottom line is that Shibaroum is probably still far away, open source code is being used (which is OK – other projects are doing it too), the Unified Fund is still working on Shibarium, and the Firechain/Rinia developers are using it to market their upcoming ICO,” Angrisani concluded.
Although the SHIB token has recovered some of its losses since the initial sell-off, it is still down 8% on the day.
