Shiba Inu Coin

Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB) is a cryptocurrency that took the entire cryptocurrency community by storm earlier this year as it emerged out of nowhere to reach a market cap of nearly $15 billion. This market cap has fallen quite a bit in the overall cryptocurrency downturn, but Shiba Inu Coin still has a respectable market cap. 

Anyway, this article will offer a comprehensive overview of all the information you need to know about Shiba Inu Coin from what it does to whether or not it’s a good investment. 

What is Shiba Inu (SHIB)?

Shiba Inu Coin is a relatively new cryptocurrency created as a supposed “Dogecoin killer” on the Ethereum blockchain. Yes, Shibu Inu Coin bills itself as a Dogecoin killer that relies on the Ethereum blockchain (ERC-20 token) rather than its own blockchain. 

That’s basically it. Shiba Inu Coin does not have much else going for it. The coin does not have any smart contract capabilities – it is simply used to transfer value from one user to another user. 

History & Founders of Shiba Inu Coin 

Shiba Inu Coin was officially launched sometime around August 2020 by an anonymous founder(s?). However, the coin did not really become relevant until a few months ago when the founders decided to donate 50% of the coins to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The value of the coins donated to Buterin were worth ~$6 billion USD.

The donation to Buterin was viewed mostly as a publicity stunt, and it was a very good publicity stunt as it caused the price of the coin to increase extremely fast. 

Unfortunately for the founders of Shiba Inu, Buterin decided to donate all the coins to COVID relief in India and the price of Shiba Inu tanked nearly 50% upon that news as many suspected the price would fall as the COVID relief fund would be forced to sell the coins for fiat currency.

The price of SHIB has not really recovered since then.

Why is Shiba Inu Coin So Valuable?

Shiba Inu Coin is valuable because, well, it is valuable. 

The coin does not actually do anything useful like a cryptocurrency such as Chainlink or Enjin. There are some staking opportunities, but that relies more on people constantly investing into the cryptocurrency than anything useful with the project itself. 

Basically, Shiba Inu Coin was popularized because many investors felt left out when the price of Dogecoin increased. So, they decided to pile onto another coin. 

Ironically, they chose a coin named after the dog breed of Dogecoin (a Shiba Inu dog is the logo of Dogecoin).

Potential Growth Plans for Shiba Inu Coin

Shiba Inu has come out with more growth plans other than donating 50% of the total supply of SHIB to Vitalik Buterin. 

Shiba Inu plans on launching an entire Shiba ecosystem on the Ethereum blockchain to help dog coin traders. 

The first step is something called ShibaSwap, which is basically a clone of SushiSwap with a focus on dog coins and the ability to stake SHIB on the exchange. ShibaSwap has had quite a bit of success since its launch on June 4, 2021 with a total value locked (TVL) of ~$1.5 billion. 

That TVL places it a little behind SushiSwap’s TVL of ~$2.35 billion, which is huge for a decentralized exchange. It is important to note that ShibaSwap has gained a lot of TVL by simply following the SushiSwap model of offering great rewards because the developers know DeFi users simply follow the best rewards. 

Unfortunately, the launch of ShibaSwap did not do much for the price of Shiba Inu Coin. 

Furthermore, a decentralized exchange being launched by an anonymous developer is always something to be cautious about. The market is likely waiting to see if ShibaSwap is a rug before viewing this information positively or negatively.

The good news with the rug concerns is that auditors did notice that the staking smart contract was controlled by a single, fresh Ethereum address. This problem was quickly fixed by changing the address to a 6/9 multi sig wallet. For those that don’t know, a 6/9 multi sig wallet means there are 9 members that can sign transactions and six must sign a transaction for it to complete. 

This adds an extra layer of security because a single person cannot drain a staking pool. It is important to note that the entire dev team (which might only be 1-2 people) could simply rug pull with a mutli sig wallet, so this is by no means a foolproof method. 

To summarize, Shiba Inu is attempting to turn itself into more than just a cryptocurrency – it wants to become an ecosystem with a decentralized exchange. More importantly, a decentralized exchange will allow staking of Shiba Inu coin. Staking will reward holders and also take a lot of the supply of SHIB off the market as it will be locked in a staking smart contract. 

Is Shibu Inu Coin a Good Investment? 

In our opinion, Shiba Inu Coin is not a good investment. We would actually rank it as a terrible investment from a strictly fundamental point of view. 

The whitepaper from the project does not even attempt to cover this fact up – the coin just doesn’t have any use other than trying to become valuable. A strategy like that is simply not a sound investment strategy, period. 

We know, SHIB has seen growth of 1,200,000% within a month. Could it experience growth like that again?

Yes, it is within the realm of possibility. Dogecoin has shown that this is possible. 

However, that does not make it a good investment for any sizable amount of money. Admittedly, SHIB can be considered a good investment with money you are willing to lose. Purchasing SHIB (or coins like it) is essentially gambling, so view it that way rather than as an investment. 

Shiba Inu Coin vs Dogecoin – Which is a better investment?

Shiba Inu Coin and Dogecoin are the two most popular meme coins at the moment. Dogecoin has an obvious lead in this case, but it has already experienced fairly large gains and that has scared off many potential investors. 

That does not make Shiba Inu Coin a better investment. In fact, Shiba Inu Coin has a lot of disadvantages compared to Dogecoin along with a few advantages. 

The first major disadvantage of Shiba Inu Coin is that it does not have any big time endorsements from celebrities. We know this sounds a little ridiculous to discuss with cryptocurrency, but neither of these coins actually do anything and rely on hype from celebrities to drive the price. As such, not having any celebrity endorsements is a big disadvantage. 

The other disadvantage of Shiba Inu Coin comes from the founding of it. As pointed out earlier, the coin was basically created to make money. Dogecoin was created as a joke almost a decade ago and had a lot of time to have a community form around it. It was then eventually used to make money. The important part is that a community already existed for the coin and it had some nominal use on Reddit over the past decade. 

Now, to be fair to Shiba Inu Coin, it is not all doom and gloom for the outlook of the coin. The three advantages it has are that it’s based on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s not deflationary, and it’s stackable. 

Those three advantages are actually somewhat standard on Ethereum. But they do set Shiba Inu Coin apart from Dogecoin in a big, positive way. 

To answer the question, neither Dogecoin or Shiba Inu Coin are actually good investments.They are both gambles that have the potential for a massive payout. You can kind of view investing in these cryptocurrencies as playing the lottery or a slot machine with much better odds. 

If you want cryptocurrency investments with long term utility, then options like Chainlink, Enjin, Polygon, and Bitcoin make more sense. Though there is always room, albeit a small amount of room, in a cryptocurrency portfolio for high risk high reward gambles like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Coin. 

SHIB Information

This section will cover some of the coin information about SHIB. Keep in mind that the price of the coin doesn’t matter that much other than making the coin difficult to denominate. 

The important part to remember is that SHIB is not inflationary like Ethereum or Dogecoin, which will add some positive support to the price. That said, there the max supply is 1 quadrillion, so there is a lot of total supply.

Name: Shiba Inu Coin

Ticker: SHIB

Launch Date: August 2020

Price: $0.000006013

Market Cap: ~$2.3 billion (#32)

All Time Market Cap: ~$14 billion (May 11, 2021)

Total Supply: 1 quadrillion

Max Supply: 1 quadrillion

Circulating Supply: 394,796 billion

Where to Buy Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB)?

Shiba Inu Coin is available on some exchanges. You can find it on Binance, Crypto.com, and decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, SushiSwap, and ShibaSwap. 

The easiest exchange to buy SHIB on is probably Crypto.com if you want a centralized exchange and Uniswap for a decentralized exchange.

Closing Thoughts

So, we hope that answers everything you might want to know about Shiba Inu. It’s an interesting coin because of the hype surrounding more than the minimal utility of the coin. This is one of the first true cryptocurrencies created for nothing more than grabbing value that has actually worked to some extent.

With that in mind, it remains to be seen how long the value of this cryptocurrency will actually last. History has shown that these type of cash grab cryptocurrencies make an appearance during a bull market and fade away during the subsequent bear market.