The marketing expert of the SHIB team, Lucie, has taken to her X (formerly popular as Twitter) account to explain an important nuance about SHIB to the community of this popular meme coin.
Lucie addressed the question she has been getting recently about whether it is possible to use Shiba Inu on the Ethereum chain. Lucie has revealed why this cannot be done without the participation of Ethereum developers.
Challenges for using SHIB on Ethereum as gas token
In her recent tweet, Lucie addressed the fact that some people within the Shiba Inu community believe it would be a good idea to use SHIB on the Ethereum chain to pay for gas fees equally to ETH.
Can #Ethererum use $SHIB ???
Ethereum is a digital platform that allows people to create and use decentralized applications, also known as smart contracts. These smart contracts require a certain amount of Ethereum, which is the native crypto of the Ethereum network, to perform… pic.twitter.com/w57lKq2Mql
— 𝐋𝐔𝐂𝐈𝐄 | SHIB.IO (@LucieSHIB) April 30, 2024
The SHIB marketing lead explained what technical challenges and issues this idea faces. Lucie reminded the SHIB audience what Ethereum is to begin with – a digital platform for creating and using decentralized apps and smart contracts. Smart contracts, in order to be used, require ETH tokens to see any actions on this network performed. Therefore, ETH is used as a “gas fee.” It powers the network and motivates miners to verify transactions on it.
This question about the possibility of a nonnative token to be used on Ethereum raises eyebrows; however, Lucie patiently explained why this is not possible. The first reason she gave is that Ethereum is designed to run on ETH and not on SHIB; there is not that close compatibility between them. Nor can any other nonnative token be used to pay for gas on Ethereum.
Lucie also mentioned that utilizing a different token from a native one (such as SHIB) on Ethereum could cause technical and security issues. Using a different token from ETH could “disrupt this mechanism and potentially compromise the security and reliability of the network,” since Ethereum runs on the proof-of-stake algorithm designed for ETH as a gas token, among other features.
Finally, Lucie also pointed out possible practical considerations here: “Introducing a different token like Shib would require significant changes to the existing infrastructure and may create confusion and complexity for users.” She then summarized her tweet, saying that using any third-party token on Ethereum with or instead of ETH is not “practical due to technical, security, and compatibility reasons.”