The meme cryptocurrency reached a record high of $0.000077 last Friday, but has now dropped to $0.000045
Shiba Inu Coin – the Dogecoin competitor, which is based on the same breed of dog – has lost 30 percent of its value in the last 24 hours.
It reached a record high of $0.000077 last Friday but has now dropped to $0.000045.
Thursday’s fall has been put down to a whale moving $2.3 billion worth of the coin from their crypto wallet.
The meme cryptocurrency has surged by a ridiculous 60,000,000 percent over the last year.
It now has a market cap of $26.8 billion.
But what is making is so popular, and is it possible to predict if it could continue to grow? Here is what you need to know.
What is Shiba Inu Coin?
On its website, Shiba Inu Coin calls itself “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building”.
It was launched in August 2020 and is listed on its own decentralized exchange called ShibaSwap.
The Shiba Token website says 50 percent of the total supply has been locked to Uniswap, a decentralized finance protocol that facilitates automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
The remaining 50 percent was burned to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
“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 website states.
However, according to Binance, “the top no 1, no 2 and no 5 wallets hold 50.5 percent, 7 percent and 3 percent of total supply respectively”.
The coin’s mascot is the Shiba Inu dog, the same breed that represents Dogecoin. It has also nicknamed itself the “Dogecoin Killer”.
Why has Shiba Inu been so popular?
Some investors find coins like Shiba Inu attractive, as they offer the opportunity for quick gains. However, you can also lose all your money in little more than an instant.
Jonathan Cheesman, head of institutional sales at crypto-derivatives exchange FTX, told Bloomberg of Shiba Inu Coin’s rise: “Memes have value and have been an investible thesis in 2021. Lower dollar-price tokens are attractive to retail.”
The market has also been buoyed by rumours it may soon be added to the popular trading platform Robinhood.
More than 300,000 people have signed a Change.org petition calling for its addition, and while Robinhood is yet to respond, its CEO Vladimir Tenev said earlier this week that the platform will “carefully evaluate whether we can add new coins in a way that’s safe for customers and in line with regulatory requirements”.
He added: “We feel very, very good about the coins that we’re currently listing on our platform. And for any new coins that we add, we want to feel equal, if not more good.”
It does not take much to move Shiba Inu’s market – earlier this month its price shot up purely because Elon Musk tweeted a picture of his puppy.
Musk has revealed that he does not own any Shiba Inu Coin himself, but does have Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
Should I invest in Shiba Inu?
People invest at their own risk and cryptocurrencies are not regulated by British financial authorities.
All crypto investments are risky, but meme coins like Shiba Inu are particularly volatile, and you should be prepared to lose everything you invest.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned in January: “Investing in crypto assets, or investments and lending linked to them, generally involves taking very high risks with investors’ money.
“If consumers invest in these types of products, they should be prepared to lose all their money.”
Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown previously explained the risks.
She said: “On top of being extremely volatile, most cryptocurrencies are unregulated, which not only adds another layer of uncertainty but also means that investors have little or no protection against fraud.”