Shiba Inu (SHIB) token has taken over the Cryptoverse, calling itself the dogecoin (DOGE) killer and prompting many to raise alarms. Meanwhile, 50% of SHIB’s total supply is deposited to the wallet of Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, while the Ethereum fees skyrocket yet again and DOGE received another boost from Elon Musk.
DOGE has become such a widespread phenomenon both within the Cryptoverse and outside of it, that it’s little surprise we’re seeing projects trying to capitalize on its image/likeness.
And today, Elon Musk took to Twitter yet again to fuel the flames, asking if Tesla should accept the coin – with 77% of nearly 1.24m votes saying ‘yes’ and 22 hours to go.
DOGE jumped by around 14% in half an hour and is now (10:10 UTC) trading at USD 0.519. The price is unchanged in a day and is up by 19% in a week.
However, a digital ‘dog’ coin, launched in August 2020, is the talk of the town today. Called SHIB, it’s referencing the Shiba Inu dog breed, which has been so firmly connected to DOGE that it’s its first association.
$SHIB is absolutely incredible. Many saw it coming from a mile away. Their logic was:
Elon => Doge
Doge => Shiba
It is inevitableHats off to all of them. pic.twitter.com/Fvh2fhCVR1
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) May 11, 2021
Perhaps there’d be nothing much to talk about SHIB has its price not jumped in the past month, the speculations being that it caught the eye of Chinese investors, in addition to being listed on major exchanges Binance, OKEx, and Huobi – all popular with Chinese traders.
Binance’s May 10 announcement describes it as “an experiment in decentralized community building and another meme coin similar to Dogecoin [and] the first token to be listed and used as an incentive for using ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange.” It also adds that three wallets hold 60.5% of the coin’s total supply.
Binance shortly suspended all withdrawals on the same day, with some suggesting it was due to the SHIB trading traffic.
CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) also said that “a large number of users” were demanding SHIB.
Some have voiced concerns about $SHIB listing. We follow users. There is a large number of users demanding it, to the point where we ran out of ETH deposit addresses due to SHIB today. Never happened before for any other ERC20 coin.
Not endorsing it. Super high risk. NFA.
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) May 10, 2021
“SHIB token allows users to hold Billions or even Trillions of them,” stated OKEx’s announcement.
The Shiba Token website adds to all this that SHIB is nicknamed ‘the DOGECOIN KILLER’, and that it’s an ERC-20 only token which “can remain well under a penny and still outpace Dogecoin in a small amount of time.”
50% of the total supply is locked in Uniswap and the keys were thrown away, they said, while “the remaining 50% was burned to Vitalik Buterin and we were the first project following this path, so everyone has to buy on the open market, ensuring a fair and complete distribution where devs don’t own team tokens they can dump on the community.”
The “woofpaper” explains further that the founder, called Ryoshi – who claimed to dislike centralized exchanges – chose Ethereum as a “secure and well-established” network that allows decentralization and growth, while half of the total supply is sent to Ethereum co-founder’s wallet because “there is no greatness without a vulnerable point and as long as VB doesn’t rug us, then SHIBA will grow and survive.”
So the team gave Buterin the coins he didn’t ask to do as he pleases, but his move could potentially bring the price down should he ever decide to sell them.
Per CoinGecko, at 7:43 UTC, the coin’s price is up 120% in a day, 1,944% in a week, and 39,205% in a month, now trading at USD 0.00003249. The maximum token supply is 1 quadrillion, while the circulation supply and the market capitalization remain under a question mark. According to CoinMarketCap, its market capitalization is USD 11.95bn, and ranks 18th by this metric.
(Photo : Reddit)
