Shibarium Hack: The Fix That Looks Worse Than the Attack

Yesterday, the Shibarium network was hacked, and today the Shiba Inu team revealed the consequences and their response. In my view, the measures they took might be even more damaging than the hack itself.

The hack:

Around $2.3M worth of ETH and SHIB was stolen. These funds were withdrawn from the Shibarium bridge and belonged to users who had provided liquidity there. That’s a serious loss - an attack of this scale could deal lasting damage to many crypto projects, especially by driving users away.

The team’s response:

• They suspended staking
• They moved the remaining bridge funds to cold storage

I honestly didn’t realize this was even possible. For most users, “staking” and “bridges” belong to the world of DeFi - where smart contracts are supposed to run everything, no one can override the rules, and certainly no one can just relocate user funds.

But apparently, the team has always had the ability to shut down staking. Even more worrying, they also had the power to pull assets out of the bridge - assets that didn’t belong to them. And that’s unlikely to change going forward.

Discoveries like this can damage - or even kill - many crypto projects.

But Shiba Inu is different. It has one of the most loyal communities in the entire crypto space. Neither hacks nor revelations about centralized, custodial control seem to weaken it. After all, this community formed around a meme coin, where the rules are different: real value and technical design don’t matter at all.

So maybe it’s no surprise that SHIB actually went up in price after all this.

Don’t forget - you can always swap SHIB at rabbit.io with the best rates, no registration, and no limits.