On Tuesday (November 30), the world’s hottest dog meme cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) managed to jump over $AVAX, the native token of smart contracts platform Avalanche after a 24% price surge in the past 24-hour period.
What Is Shiba Inu ($SHIB)?
Here is how South Korean crypto exchange Korbit described this meme-based cryptocurrency when it announced on November 23 that it was going to list $SHIB:
“SHIB is inspired by Dogecoin. Last August, anonymous developer Ryoshi developed the motto “Experiment in decentralized governance”. Although it claims to be a Dogecoin killer as much as it benchmarked Dogecoin, there are a few important differences except that it is a meme coin with a pet dog as its mascot.
“First, since ShibaInu is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, it can be easily integrated with the Ethereum ecosystem and can be used in a variety of ways. A decentralized exchange (DEX) called ShibaSwap is in operation, and in addition to this, a ShibaInu incubator that sponsors artists, and an NFT collection that can be purchased with ShibaInu tokens have also been launched.
“Second, unlike Dogecoin, which operates on its own mainnet, forked from Litecoin, ShibaInu benefits from the security-verified Ethereum network.
“Third, ShibaInu was distributed evenly using Uniswap’s liquidity pool. As a result, Etherscan confirms that token holders are well decentralized.”
$SHIB’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, on crypto exchange FTX, the price of the $SHIB token started the day at $0.00004550, got as high as $0.00005136 at 4:38 a.m. UTC, and currently (as of 08:30 a.m. UTC) $SHIB is trading around $0.00004878, up 24.6% in the past 24-hour period.
This means that $SHIB, with a market cap of around $27.04 billion, is now the 11th most valuable cryptoasset by market cap, and is comfortably ahead of $AVAX, which currently has a market cap of around $26.17 billion.
Furthermore, on a day that Bitcoin is down 1.5%, $SHIB is currently the best performing cryptoasset in the top 100 by far.
Three Main Drivers Behind $SHIB’s Most Recent Rally
Three major pieces of news seem to have helped $SHIB.
First, last Friday (November 26), online retail giant Newegg confirmed via the following tweet that it would soon start accepting $SHIB as a payment method:
This was officially announced yesterday:
Second, last Saturday (November 27), Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous lead for the Shiba Inu project explained how the team is preparing to make a very impressive entrance into the world of gaming.
In a Medium blog post titled “The Future of Gaming Is Shib”, Shytoshi started by saying that although he could not provide “exact” about the game that his team is building (because of concerns over how quickly many other people would try to steal the concept), he did reveal that their new games division — Shiba Inu games — has hired legendary veteran video game designer and developer William David Volk to lead the design and implementation of the game, which is being developed by a “AAA Game Studio”.
Volk — former VP of Technology at Activision — who indicates on his LinkedIn page that he has been working on a freelance basis for Shiba Inu Games since the start of the month, had this to say:
“I am honored to be working with an amazing team on what will become one of the most significant games of all time.“
Third, yesterday (November 29), Kraken, which is one of the world’s oldest (founded in 2011) and most respected crypto exchanges announced that it would be listing $SHIB on November 30.
In its blog post, Kraken said:
“Deposits require 20 confirmations (~5 minutes). You can add SHIB to your Kraken account by navigating to Funding, selecting the asset, and hitting Deposit. The minimum deposit is 373,000 SHIB.
“SHIB will be tradeable against USD and EUR, with a trading minimum of 50,000 SHIB, a price precision of 8 decimal places and a quantity precision of 5 decimal places.“
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.