Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme token which began as a fun currency and has now transformed into a decentralised ecosystem. The launch of the Shiba Inu coin quickly gained speed and value as a community of investors was drawn in by the cute charm of the coin paired with headlines and tweets from personalities like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
What Is SHIBA INU (SHIB)?
The Shiba Inu coin was created anonymously in August 2020 under the pseudonym "Ryoshi." Ryoshi says about himself that he is a nobody and not important and that the efforts to unmask his identity, even if successful, would be underwhelming.
This meme coin quickly gained speed and value as a community of investors was drawn in by the cute charm of the coin paired with headlines and tweets from personalities like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik Buterin was long believed to be the originator of Shiba Inu, but denied such rumours on the Lex Fridman podcast on June 5, 2021.
Shiba Inu aims to be the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin's Srypt-based mining algorithm. Shiba Inu and the SHIB token are part of a swarm of dog-themed cryptocurrencies, including Baby Dogecoin (BabyDoge), Dogecoin (DOGE), JINDO INU (JIND), Alaska Inu (LAS) and Alaskan Malamute Token (LASM). These lesser-valued tokens have attracted investors who missed the Dogecoin pump from 0.0002 to nearly 0.75 USD.
Shiba's success sparked an avalanche of copycats, such as BitShiba, Shiba Fantom, Shibalana, King Shiba, SHIBAVAX, Captain Shibarrow, SHIBA2K22, SpookyShiba and countless others. In total, there may be well over 100 Shiba Inu copies, and the number keeps rising constantly.
On Sept. 17, 2021, Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, listed Shiba Inu on their platform. This news caused Shiba Inu price to rise by over 40% in the following two days, bringing the meme dog token into the spotlight again.
Shiba Inu has since attracted more interest from other exchanges as well. Bitso, Mexico's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, announced in September that SHIB would start trading on its exchange. Giottus, an Indian crypto exchange, announced the same. Bitstamp, the biggest crypto exchange in Europe, said that it would list Shiba Inu for trading at the beginning of 2022. Korbit, a South Korean exchange, became the country's first exchange to list the SHIB token in 2021.
Who Are the Founders of SHIBA INU?
The SHIBA INU WoofPaper has three reasons why their team created SHIB:
"We started from zero, with zero."
"The brilliant minds behind Shib had never collaborated before."
"We love Shiba Inu Dogs."
The anonymous creator of the Shiba Inu coin is known as "Ryoshi." However, very little is known of the mystery founder of the dog-themed cryptocurrency, much like the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
In his blog RYOSHI RESEARCH, he characterises himself as "just some guy of no consequence tapping at a keyboard." Ryoshi said that usually in projects there are different roles like a CEO, a "tech guy," and a roadmap, resulting in "someone plebs can bitch at." He stresses that with Shiba, no one person is accountable or responsible and underlines that he owns 0 SHIB to this day. For this reason, Ryoshi can be "pure and unbiased," getting satisfaction from Shiba "in other ways."
It has been speculated that Vitalik Buterin was behind the initial liquidity that helped set up Shiba Inu's liquidity on Uniswap. According to Ryoshi, he had "a fren" he met at Devcon in Osaka that sent him 10 ETH to set up the liquidity pair on Uniswap. Ryoshi also stated that Shiba Inu was an experiment in decentralised community building, and he thus declined all the influencer requests and pitches from different exchanges he received. His "job" is to defend the brand and give suggestions, although he does so very sparingly, as his last blog entry dates back to May 2021.
What Makes SHIBA INU Unique?
The SHIBA INU website invites dog-inspired artists from all over the world to foster the "artistic Shiba movement" as they bring their SHIBA INU community into the NFT market. SHIBA INU has also created a campaign using Amazon Smile in order to collect donations to rescue real, live Shiba Inu dogs with the Shiba Inu Rescue Association.
After initially being only one meme coin of many, Shiba Inu skyrocketed to popularity after Vitalik Buterin famously burned his share of the SHIB supply. Ryoshi had given Buterin 50% of the SHIB supply, announcing that "as long as Vitalik doesn't rug us," Shiba Inu would be fine.
However, Buterin decided to burn 90% of his share, which later would have been worth billions thanks to the soaring value of SHIB. The remaining 10% were sent to a charity, as were about 50 trillion SHIB more that Vitalik had donated to a COVID-19 relief fund. He stated that he did not want "to be a locus of power" and thus gave the tokens away. This resulted in a temporary loss of value for SHIB, which the token later recovered from after the community agreed on an arrangement with the charity in question.
Ryoshi's goal for Shiba Inu has been to see if a perpetual decentralised organisation could work with no central leadership. In a blog post, Royshi noted that the rift caused by Buterin's token donation made the community stronger and would enable it to distribute further and decentralise the movement. His vision for the core ecosystem is to perform its utility while the Shiba Inu-own stablecoin becomes the globalized exchange of value.
Why is Shiba Inu so popular?
In October 2021, SHIB surged on the news of a possible Robinhood listing and briefly flipped Dogecoin to become the most-valued meme coin by market capitalization. Thus far, Robinhood has not listed SHIB, despite a petition with over 500,000 signatures calling for it. Robinhood executive Christine Brown has lauded the efforts of the Shiba Inu community, saying that one of her favourite things was seeing it engage with the community to make its wishes heard. However, Robinhood would prioritise safety over the "short-term gain" of a new token listing and has left Shiba Inu fans waiting since.
The October 2021 price surge famously minted a billionaire, as one wallet was uncovered that had bought $8,000 worth of SHIB in summer 2020, which was worth over $5.7 billion at SHIB's all-time high valuation. The wallet owner has not been determined, although the person appears to have sent parts of their fortune to other wallets several weeks after the price explosion.
The price surge also led to increased adoption across token holders. WhaleStats compiled data of the largest ETH wallets and found that SHIB represents over 20% of the combined market shares of all ERC-20 tokens held by Ethereum whales. CRO was a distant second with only 5%. SHIB also surpassed the one-million holder mark following its all-time high.
Moreover, retailers increasingly started adopting SHIB as a means of payment following its popularity among small-time investors. American electronics retailer Newegg added SHIB at the start of December 2021, partnering with crypto payments platform BitPay to unlock payments in SHIB. This followed the adoption of SHIB by over 500 merchants, according to payments firm CoinGate, with even Samsung-backed digital wallet provider ZenGo adding SHIB to its options and a restaurant in Paris accepting it as a payment option. At one point, the Shiba Inu community called for McDonald's to accept Shiba Inu, although the social media effort eventually fell short.
Where did the Shiba Inu token get its value?
A major reason for the surging price of SHIB was a continued effort by the SHIB community to build a utility for the Shiba Inu token and the subsequent emergence of an entire Shiba Inu ecosystem.
ShibaSwap is the coin's designated DEX that started as a fork of Sushiswap that has, in the words of Ryoshi, its "own little twists and elements." Furthermore, Shiba Inu also plans to develop SHI, which will be the "global exchange of value for plebs," an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to one cent instead of one dollar as most other stablecoins. Its launch is planned after the Shiba layer-two solution called Shibarium, and Ryoshi envisions SHI to work in a similar way to DAI. That way, SHI would have collateral as a backstop that would push it back to one cent if the peg was lost.
According to Ryoshi, the end goal is that SHI becomes a global stable currency "that plebs across all countries are able to use as both a store of value and method of payment."
In addition to SHI, a financial ecosystem is planned, and SHI would be added as a weighted pool pair on Curve. In that case, Ryoshi expects forks of the major DeFi protocols to appear in the Shiba Inu ecosystem, which would require an immutable bridge to function.
Shiba would also start hosting localised meetups and a once-a-year ShibaCon convention that would be hosted at an easily accessible location in a country without oppressive visa restrictions "for the sake of inclusiveness for global plebs."
One immediate change Shiba Inu has implemented is increasing token burns, which have sparked renewed interest in the token at the beginning of 2022. Bigger Entertainment, a crypto record label selling merch, NFTs and concert tickets, organised a SHIB burn party that burned over 239 million SHIB over Christmas. In total, the team has burned almost one billion SHIB since the end of October.
How many Shiba Inu tokens are there?
There are currently around 589,389,273,508,356 SHIB tokens in circulation.
How Is the SHIBA INU Network Secured?
The Shiba Inu token is an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum, a proof-of-work blockchain currently transitioning to proof-of-stake.
Ryoshi announced in his final blog post to date that Shiba Inu would develop its own layer-two solution that would be more decentralised than Polygon or BSC, both of which Ryoshi regards as not truly decentralised. The Shiba L2 would be called "Shibarium" and is supposed to use BONE as its primary pair token, as written above.
According to Ryoshi, Shibarium would be built by a "very competent blockchain team" with experience building such solutions. Developer Eric M has announced in the Shiba Inu Discord server that Shibarium would launch "soon," although he did not specify a date.
What is the controversy around the Shiba Inu token?
At the beginning of May 2021, dog-themed meme tokens like Shiba Inu saw transaction volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Shiba Inu price hit an all-time high (ATH) of 0.00005 on May 10, 2021, before going on a downtrend since.
As mentioned above, on May 13, Vitalik Buterin (who was given half of the token supply by the developers) announced that he was donating a large amount of these tokens to a fund helping India with COVID relief. The SHIBA developers had not anticipated Buterin selling his tokens, but eventually, the two parties came to a mutually satisfying agreement. Later, the fund actually lamented having sold its tokens too early, as its share would have been worth well over $1 billion at the token's all-time high.
Despite rumours alleging the contrary, Elon Musk does not own any SHIB. He confirmed as much in a tweet, which caused a temporary price drop.
