Shiba Inu (SHIB) is one of the most popular memecoins, inspired by the famous “doge” meme featuring a Japanese Shiba Inu dog. It gained rapid popularity in 2021, soon after its launch, and at a time when meme-based trading emerged as a new phenomenon among Reddit users. However, unlike many memecoins, which offer minimal utility, SHIB is now the native token for the Shibarium Layer 2 platform and can be used for staking or liquidity provision in the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) is one of the most popular memecoins, inspired by the famous “doge” meme featuring a Japanese Shiba Inu dog. It gained rapid popularity in 2021, soon after its launch, and at a time when meme-based trading emerged as a new phenomenon among Reddit users. However, unlike many memecoins, which offer minimal utility, SHIB is now the native token for the Shibarium Layer 2 platform and can be used for staking or liquidity provision in the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
SHIB launched with a supply of one quadrillion tokens, of which half was sent to Vitalik Buterin, and the other half was immediately put into circulation. Vitalik Buterin ultimately burned (destroyed) the half he was sent.
Despite a tumultuous few years involving the departure of the project’s founder and some dramatic price volatility outlined below, Shiba Inu remains a leader in the memecoin segment, thanks to its loyal and engaged community.
Shiba Inu Price Charts
Like most memecoins, SHIB displays volatility that’s frequently more extreme than other digital assets like BTC or ETH. However, unlike another leading memecoin, Dogecoin, SHIB price movements have sometimes been connected to fundamental factors such as a mass token burning. Even so, the meme-based nature of SHIB means that it can undergo wild price movements that may not be correlated to any actual events.
For this reason, technical analysis of SHIB can be unreliable since it assumes that past price trends will help predict future movements. Nevertheless, under less volatile conditions, technical analysis may help to identify patterns in the price of SHIB.
SHIB Price and its History
As shown in the price charts, the Shiba Inu token has undergone three notable price highs since it launched in the second half of 2020.
Following the launch, Shiba Inu’s pseudonymous founder Ryoshi sent half the entire token supply to Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum. In early 2021, Shiba Inu began to rise in price as meme-based assets shot to instant popularity with the Wall Street Bets traders' group on Reddit.
In May of that year, Vitalik Buterin decided to get rid of all his SHIB tokens, donating 10% of the total supply to a COVID-19 relief fund set up for India and sending the entire remaining 40% to a burn address.
This rapid supply constraint created the first price high for SHIB, causing it to reach a price of $0.00003 with a market cap of $12 billion. However, the price wasn’t sustained for long, falling back by roughly 70% within a month.
It was short-lived, though, since the crypto market was undergoing a bull market in 2021. On October 28, SHIB posted its all-time high of $0.000088, reaching a market cap of over $37 billion.
Following another dramatic decline, the price of SHIB has largely followed the market since the all-time high, with the notable exception of the departure of the project’s founder in 2022, which caused a temporary crash. However, prices recovered after a developer from the Shiba Inu community, Shytoshi, stepped up to lead the project.
In February 2023, SHIB achieved a new yearly high of $0.00003 as it rose in price along with the crypto markets, following the news that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had approved several new Bitcoin ETFs. At this time, memecoins once again achieved viral popularity with traders, as others, including Dogecoin and dogwifhat displayed outsized volatility compared to the wider market.
Shiba Inu remains one of the most popular meme-based cryptos and a staple at the upper end of the cryptocurrency ranking tables. As a token with some utility in its own ecosystem (for example, paying transaction fees on the Shibarium Layer 2), it has some potential to generate demand, independently of the market popularity of memecoins. However, this depends on the ongoing adoption and usage of Shibarium and the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
Conclusion
- Shiba Inu is a token based on the Shiba Inu dog meme and has become one of the most popular memecoins
- SHIB prices have benefited from the crypto community’s enthusiasm for memecoins, but the project has also created utility for the token with a DEX and Ethereum Layer 2.
- After an all-time price high of $0.00008 in October 2021, SHIB has performed broadly in line with the rest of the crypto markets.