Want your own blockchain? With the new Shib Alpha Layer, Shiba Inu’s lead ambassador Shytoshi Kusama says it’s now possible — just press a button and give it a few minutes.
Kusama, the philosophical yet often unpredictable lead voice behind the Shiba Inu project, took to his podcast this week with a bold promise: custom blockchains, built on demand, in minutes.
On the fifth episode of Shy Speaks SHIB, Kusama and a guest identified as John Doe, Shibarium’s Engineering Manager, mapped out what they see as the next phase for the Shiba Inu ecosystem. And it wasn’t all vague blue-sky talk. This time, they had specifics—tools, timelines, tech.
The conversation circled around something they’ve dubbed the Shib Alpha Layer, a new rollup framework that lets developers spin up their own blockchain environments on top of Shibarium’s infrastructure.
How fast? Thirty minutes, give or take. No massive developer teams. No venture capital gatekeeping. Just a console, an API key, and a bit of patience.
True to form, Kusama opened with a detour through world history — Mesoamerican agriculture, ancient Egypt’s scribes, even the hundredth monkey theory. All of it folding back to one point: innovation builds culture.
“At its core,” Kusama said, “what a location or culture develops is extremely important… it’s about producing a product or a series of products that allows a culture… to flourish.”
For the Shiba Inu lead ambassador, the Shiba Inu ecosystem isn’t just a crypto project. It’s a kind of cultural experiment. A “nation-state,” he called it, powered not by borders but by code.
It was during this long view that John Doe stepped in with the grounded, boots-on-the-floor tech update.
“What we should be doing is give a platform for developers to come, ask questions, get it answered,” Doe said, casually dropping news of a tech-only Telegram group that had already attracted hundreds of active developers. “People are like discussing all kinds of ideas,” he added, with a tone that made it clear this was just the beginning.
Talk soon turned to dev.shib.io, the official Shib dev portal, which quietly launched last September.
“It’s one portal where we are trying to bring… all the SDKs that we’re currently building, all the APIs that we’re currently building, one place that everyone can come and… look at things and start building,” Doe explained.
Developers can generate their own API keys and tap into a faucet for free testnet BONE tokens, making it easy to build and test without burning cash. Kusama pointed out one of Shibarium’s proudest stats: “You know what is the average gas fee at this point? It’s two gwei,” he said. “It’s so cheap that you can do whatever you want… for a whole day and you will still not spend $1.”
The dev portal is shaping up as more than a toolset—it’s turning into an invitation.
But the biggest reveal was yet to come.
When the conversation landed on rollups—the Layer 3 technology underlying the Shib Alpha Layer—Kusama didn’t hold back.
“If I’m a major corporation or government and I’m talking about implementing this for 10 million people, Shibarium was not gonna cut it, right?” he said. “Because I can’t have a day where the cost thousand X’s.”
That’s where rollups step in. As Doe explained it: “It’s just another blockchain, which is much more flexible than an already existing blockchain, conventional blockchain. That’s what a roll-up is… It’s your own blockchain.”
Then came the kicker.
“Do you know how many minutes it would take right now for us to launch a rollup?” Doe asked.
“Thirty minutes,” he answered himself. “You press a button and… it’s up and running, your own blockchain.”
Kusama’s reaction was part surprise, part showmanship. “Wow, 30 minutes and I have my — are you serious?”
He didn’t waste time sketching out where this leads. “This is how the little guy… now has a shot. I can have my own chain.”
Developers used to working on EVM chains won’t need to relearn much either. “You are at home,” Doe said. “The contract that you have once deployed on Shibarium… I think you’ll have to make like one line change.”
But for Kusama, tech alone isn’t the point. The goal is empowerment, decentralization, and maybe — just maybe — the discovery of that elusive, culture-defining “killer app.”
His frustration with the world’s status quo bubbled up near the close. “Everything that we need to have a world of peace, we have already… It’s not a problem if we don’t have it. It’s a problem if we actually just choose not to do it.” He sees technologies like those Shib is building as creating new choices.
The podcast episode, rich with Kusama’s characteristic blend of philosophy and project promotion, ultimately served as an open call. Doe’s final words were succinct: “Come and build, come and build, and come and build. That’s all I have to say.” The message from the digital airwaves was clear: Shiba Inu is looking to equip an army of developers, with the Shib Alpha Layer as a key piece of new weaponry in its crypto development arsenal.
