Shiba Inu dog.Getty Images
Most altcoins sold off Wednesday but shiba inu continues to set new record highs.The meme token has gained 710% in the past month alone and looks to unseat dogecoin for the top 10 largest crypto spot.Shiba inu was founded in August 2020 and now has 1 quadrillion coins in circulation.
Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell .Altcoin season is upon us again, though most are selling off Wednesday, and one unsuspecting frontrunner continues to set new records: shiba inu.
The meme token, which seemingly vaulted out of nowhere, is now looking to takeover dogecoin’s spot to become the 10th largest digital assets in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Shiba inu surged as much as 45% Wednesday to a fresh intraday high of $0.00006220, according to data from CoinGecko , taking its gains over the past month to nearly 710%.With a market value of $30.9 million, it is the 11th biggest crypto asset.
But what is shiba inu in the first place? Shiba inu is an ethereum-based alternative to dogecoin, a meme token favored by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Cuban.It even calls itself a dogecoin killer and, like dogecoin, features the Shiba Inu dog as its mascot as well.
The token was founded in August 2020 by someone called Ryoshi whose goal was to move away from “rigid social structures and traditional mindsets,” according to its 28-page white paper, or in shiba inu’s case, woof paper.
Instead, shiba inu wanted to be “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building” and to give power back to the “average person.”
So why is it rallying? A couple of reasons.
On Wednesday, the rise in price could be attributed to an online petition on Change.org that’s gotten more than 300,000 signatures calling for Robinhood to be the first traditional brokerage to list the shiba inu coin .
Recently, shiba inu also released a series of non-fungible tokens called ” shiboshis ” that are written on the ethereum blockchain.Some of these feature shiba inus wearing a party hat or having laser eyes.
And in May, the coin made headlines when ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated 50 trillion (then worth around $1 billion) to a crypto-based COVID-19 relief fund for India.
Beyond that, it’s really just the Shib Army just rallying behind the coin.
“The crypto universe is full of coins that represent diverse use cases and themes,” John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the team behind altcoin avalanche, told Insider.
And meme tokens, he said, “are driven by culture and represent an underlying theme or movement, rather than special technical use cases.”
So does that mean shiba inu has no real use case? It is tough to say – for now at least.Wu said shiba inu “wasn’t built with a sophisticated use case like borrowing, lending, trading, or gaming,” but it is trying to be useful.
Since shiba inu is written on the ethereum blockchain, this may suggest it has more advanced smart-contracting capabilities, Wu said.One example is Shibaswap, a platform launched in July 2021 that aims to provide utility for the token in terms of staking and rewards.
It is worth noting that shiba inu wasn’t designed to have a limited supply and currently has 1 quadrillion coins in circulation, while bitcoin for instance is capped at 21 million.
How much is a shiba inu? If you think dogecoin at $0.244775 is cheap, wait until you hear how much shiba inu is.
The coin trades for just $0.00006289.So owning 1 million of shiba inu coins will only amount to $62.89.
But we already know nominal price isn’t the best way to measure the attractiveness of a crypto.Instead, it’s the future use cases of the asset as well as the potential it brings.
And having a passionate community behind it doesn’t hurt either.
Read the original article on Business Insider .
