After the advent of Bitcoin, many new cryptocurrencies offered alternatives in terms of usage. Companies like Ethereum have actually added new features and services. Then there’s Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by an internet meme. Shiba Inu coins aren’t worth very much right now, but they’re getting attention for a number of reasons. However, the coin has a large share of the cryptocurrency market and has proven to be a great choice for investors.
But what is a Shiba Inu coin, and how did it get into the cryptocurrency picture? Is it worth investing in it?
Let’s explore. If you want to learn more about the Shiba Inu coin and get answers to what it is, you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you understand the question, “What is a Shiba Inu coin?” The blog covers all important concepts related to this type of cryptocurrency.
Table of Contents
What Are Meme coins?
Meme coin is a cryptocurrency term for a popular currency depicted in comical or animated memes supported by avid online traders and followers. Meme Coins can be fun, but they are also very risky investments and may have little or no intrinsic value.
Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and other currencies that can provide more entertainment than usefulness fall into this category. When buying or trading Meme Coin, it is important to understand the risks to avoid unexpected volatility and losses.
SHIB: A Meme Coin
Dogecoin (DOGE) was originally a meme coin, but since becoming popular, a number of competing for dog-themed cryptocurrencies have contended for the crown, including Doge Cash, Akita Inu, and Dogelon Mars.
At its most basic level, SHIB is the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin. Unlike Dogecoin, this is not a coin that exists on its own blockchain, but rather a token, a cryptocurrency that runs on top of the infrastructure of another blockchain. So, if Dogecoin is a fork from Luckycoin, which is a fork of the Bitcoin sub-Litecoin, then SHIB is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. Like Dogecoin, SHIB is a meme asset. A cryptocurrency inspired by an internet meme and created by a community of enthusiasts.
Meme Coin price movements are often related to sentiment around breaking news and the activities of social media influencers. The Shiba Inu itself is named after the dog breed of the same name that became the face of the Doge meme that inspired the creation of Dogecoin.
The origin of SHIB
Shiba Inu or SHIB, is a decentralized cryptocurrency created in August 2020 by an anonymous individual/group known as “Ryoshi”. It was created to play a trick on Dogecoin, the first meme coin that was launched in 2013 and became hugely popular. Let’s start with the origin of the name Shiba Inu. The Shiba Inu is derived from a name for the Japanese dog breed. The breed inspired an internet meme in the 21st century under the name “Doge”. The meme grew so big that it inspired some programmers to create a cryptocurrency based on it, calling it Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was created by two engineers based on a popular meme about the Shiba Inu, a Japanese hunting dog breed. The popularity of dogecoin has led to the creation of many other meme coins. Clearly, the creators of the Shiba Inu meme coin have the intention to overthrow Dogecoin in the crypto space. In 2021, the price of Shiba Inu Coins skyrocketed. Shiba Inu’s current market cap is $26 billion, while Dogecoin is over $30 billion.
Coupled with flippant narratives and a “memetic” mentality, these coins are becoming increasingly popular due to their extremely high volatility, even by the standards of the troubled crypto segment. Dogecoin (DOGE), for example, surged more than 10x overnight during the first phase of the meme coin craze in Q1 2021.
In early May 2021, the Shiba Inu coin (SHIB) surged 300x in less than 10 days before losing more than 80% of its value in one week. This is why, for most cryptocurrency holders, Meme Token is a kind of “slot machine” that can make “life-changing money” even for small traders.
Tesla founder Elon Musk once tweeted that he was interested in owning a Shiba puppy. As a result, SHIB recognised its popularity in the crypto market. This led to an increase in the prices by approximately 300%. After Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum Blockchain Network, donated 50 trillion Shiba Inu coins to the India Relief Fund, founded by a crypto entrepreneur named Sandeep Naiwal, the price fell by 40%.
What is SHIB? How Does It Work?
At its most basic level, SHIB is the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin. Unlike Dogecoin, this is not a coin that exists on its own blockchain, but rather a token, a cryptocurrency that runs on top of the infrastructure of another blockchain. So, if Dogecoin is a fork from Luckycoin, which is a fork of the Bitcoin sub-Litecoin, then SHIB is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain.
Like Dogecoin, SHIB is a meme asset. A cryptocurrency inspired by an internet meme and created by a community of enthusiasts.
Meme Coin’s price movement is often related to the sentiment of influencers’ breaking news and social media activity. The Shiba Inu itself is named after the dog breed of the same name that became the face of the Doge meme that inspired the creation of Dogecoin.
Price History: SHIB
SHIB started price action in August 2020 at a price below $0.00000001. These very low prices were maintained throughout 2020 and into early 2021. The price was following a bullish trend in the market as it started to rise, hitting a new high of $0.000003 in May 2021, a 3300% increase in price in just one week. This was followed by the biggest gain ever, with the price reaching $0.000088 in October 2021.
By January 2022, the price had dropped back to $0.00003. Since then, the price has slowly declined and is trading near the mid-2021 level of $0.00001. As of October 10th of this year, the price of SHIB is approximately $0.000011. With an offer of approximately 549 trillion SHIB, it has a market cap of approximately $5.9 billion and a fully diluted market cap of approximately $6.4 billion. This market cap ranks SHIB at number 14 in the cryptocurrency market cap rankings.
Is It Safe To Invest In SHIB?
A Shiba Inu is not a safe investment by traditional standards. A Shiba Inu could be a great investment, but only if the meme lives on and can see an eventual resurgence. SHIB is a classic high-risk, high-return investment. While ShibaSwap’s growing popularity could lead to huge returns, Shiba doesn’t add anything new to the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem. This may change after we launch the Tier 2 network, but until then it is nothing more than a dog-branded Meme Coin. Being on the Ethereum network, it may still have more use cases than Dogecoin, but that doesn’t mean better performance. Perhaps it depends on who is promoting it and how much hype they can bring with their tokens.
Additionally, there are certain security risks when donating cryptocurrency to anonymous projects like ShibaSwap. This is because the code allows developers to cheat investors out of cryptocurrencies. Scams costing users millions of dollars are becoming increasingly common in DeFi, the Wild West. If an experienced code auditor has access to the code, but it has not yet been audited by ShibaSwap, this possibility can be ruled out.
Future of SHIB
Shiba Inu has promised more updates and new features to the network. One such feature will be Ethereum’s own L2, with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called Doggy DAO to engage the community in solving the future of SHIB. There are also plans to build an NFT trading platform exclusively on Shibarium. In this case, users will finally be able to buy and sell non-fungible tokens for SHIB tokens through the platform. This will be created alongside other games, such as their metaverse, SHIB: The Metaverse, and Shiba Eternity within the ecosystem. Shiba Inu has also launched a Shiba Artist Incubator, which plans to hire ten artists to create works that can be minted as official Shiba NFTs.
Regarding the price of Shiba Inu, some experts believe that it can rise at a steady rate in the long run due to active updates, while others believe that it is just a meme coin and will always be so. Also, since Shiba Inu is built on the Ethereum network, it is heavily influenced by Ethereum. The same is likely to be the case for the upcoming L2 Shibarium, and while Ethereum continues to upgrade its blockchain to Ethereum 2.0, changes to Shiba Inu are also expected.
Wrapping It Up
Now that Shiba Inu has entered the top 20 cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $11.1 billion, many are starting to wonder what it will take to overtake its big brother, Dogecoin. At this price, SHIB’s circulating supply of 394 trillion has a higher market cap than Dogecoin, putting it in the top 10. This would require a 165.5% increase in price. These prices represent a 91.5% increase from the all-time high of $0.0000388 in May.
