Elon Musk’s puppy, a new strategy to burn tokens, and altcoins playing catch up — the perfect storm for cryptocurrency Shiba Inu to skyrocket

Value of the meme coin Shiba Inu has skyrocketed over past one weekBI India/Canva

Shiba Inu has managed to retain itself among the top 20 largest cryptocurrencies in the market for over a week now. The cryptocurrency made its debut a little over a year ago and has seen one of the fastest jumps in popularity.

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX was among the first to list the SHIB token in the country. Users on the platform can directly buy the cryptocurrency using Indian rupees or exchange for it using Tether (USDT) or the exchange’s native WarizX token (WRX).

It only took the meme coin 14 months to hit a market value of $12 billion and become the 12th biggest cryptocurrency by market value at its peak. In comparison, it took Dogecoin 88 months — six times longer — to be as big.

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The rally has investors asking other cryptocurrency platforms to list the Shiba token as well. A petition on Change.org is urging trading app Robinhood to add the coin to their roster. It has over 2.27 lakh signatures so far.

This petition is designed to kindly request Robinhood to please list Shiba Inu coin to trade. Dogecoin has been a huge success for Robinhood, and its investors… Shiba has just been listed on Binance and its momentum grows by the hour… Let's encourage Robinhood to be the first traditional brokerage to get on this train! Thank you.

Petition on Change.org asking Robinhood to list Shiba Inu on its exchange

And, all this, because of one tweet by tech billionaire Elon Musk of his real life Shibu Inu puppy called ‘Floki’.

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Other factors that may have caused Shiba Inu to skyrocket

Traditionally, when Bitcoin’s value increases, the value of altcoins sees a dip. And, when Bitcoin’s value corrects itself, altcoins play catch up. Many believe that Shibu Inu’s rally last week was just that — an altcoin playing catch up and getting caught in the headwinds of Musk’s tweet.

Others attribute the coin’s rise to speculation over a major whale purchase — someone who is expected to buy a lot of SHIB. According to Yahoo Finance, an unknown whale bought around 6.3 trillion SHIB for approximately $44 million in September.

Meme coin Shiba Inu rally slows down — but it’s still worth thrice what it was a week ago

Some consider Shiba Inu to be a ‘shit’ coin — a coin with no inherent value — others believe that it could potentially be the ‘Dogecoin Killer’. While Dogecoin uses the same technology as Bitcoin, Shiba Inu is powered by Ethereum. Either way, there’s no denying the break neck speed with which the latter gained value.

Even after the rally behind the meme token seems to have slowed down — a 300% growth followed by 30% retrace — Shiba Inu is still worth thrice as much as it was a week ago at a price of $0.00002839 on October 11 at 5:00pm.

Shibu Inu is gearing for a comeback after the largest dump in its history

According to analytics platform Santiment, the hit that SHIB’s price took on October 8 was due to small whales dumping more than 30 billion tokens directly into the market — the largest dump in the token’s history. This, in turn, created massive selling pressure.

However, today, the cryptocurrency’s value is up by more than 10% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Santiment asserts that the dumped tokens have most likely been redistributed among ‘micro traders’.

On the flip side, trading volumes on Binance show that investors may be losing interest in Shiba Inu. It has fallen from a peak of 240 trillion to less than 80 trillion — one third of what it used to be — as of 2:00 pm Indian Standard Time (IST) on October 12. The total value locked on ShibaSwap is only $448.96 million versus the $2.35 billion traded on Binance, in the last 24 hours.

Shiba Inu has an answer for the nay-sayers

Investor Michael Burry, famous for being one of the few people who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming, expressed that the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency is “pointless.” In a tweet that has since been deleted, Burry shared that the tokens aren’t a desirable investment because the total supply exceeds a quadrillion tokens — this, in effect, limits any possible price appreciation.

However, Shiba Inu is working on solving that problem too. The developer behind the cryptocurrency has partnered with NowPayments.io to burn a percentage of SHIB tokens with each transaction.

The primary criticism of this strategy is that burning a meaningful percentage of the cryptocurrency will take years. Instead, the community behind the cryptocurrency has suggested a manual burn to reduce the number of tokens in circulation.

For now, Shiba Inu investors are waiting for the launch of Shiboshis — a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that will be minted on ShibaSwap — and the project’s plans to enter the world of gaming.

Shiba Inu is a joke… about a joke

The cryptocurrency was founded in August 2020, created by someone with the pseudonym ‘Ryoshi’. Just as Dogecoin was created as a joke after the viral meme of the real life Shibu Inu called Kabosu, Shiba Inu is often considered to be the satirical rip off of Dogecoin.

In India, the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency came into the limelight when Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, donated nearly $1 billion to fund India’s fight against COVID-19 during the second wave earlier this year. One part of the funds were in 500 Ether (ETH) and the other part consisted of 50 trillion SHIB.

Shortly afterwards, Buterin — who was given 50% of the total SHIB tokens in circulation during the coin’s initial launch — burned 90% of the cryptocurrency in his possession by sending it to a dead wallet. At the end, SHIB’s price saw an all time high of $0.00003502.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post in partnership with WazirX