As the popularity of Shiba Inu ($SHIB) has grown, its price has skyrocketed (roughly 44.25 million percent in the year-to-date period). This has resulted in the rapidly increasing adoption of $SHIB as a form of payment by merchants around the world.
What Is Shiba Inu ($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 in Venezuela
A report published by $SHIB Informer on June 16 explained how businesses in this South American country — which has been suffering from hyperinflation since 2016 — first started adopting $SHIB.
A member of the $SHIB community in Venezuela told them:
“The business owners that started with this are also $SHIB holders, so they contacted the Venezuelan SHIB community to find a way to make this work.“
The report went on to say:
“So far, at the moment of this article being released, at least 15 places are accepting $SHIB. Among those stores they sell fast food, liquor, hardware, electronics, office supplies, services and more.“
Alejandro Yañez, from the Choripan Food Truck, probably the first business owner in Venezuela to accept $SHIB as a form of payment told $SHIB Informer:
“We don’t fear the new, we fear what is static, and life challenges you every day. You move forward or wait your whole life to decide, so we chose to support $SHIB and its ecosystem. We see it as a community project for the community. On June 4 we did the first transaction, of many we hope to have in our country.
“Today’s sale was an easy sale, but still we were very excited, doing something new for us for the first time, and we are convinced that this was a good step. It was not just ‘a sale’. It was for us a way to show that we believe that there is something for us waiting at the moon.“
On October 11, Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous lead for the Shiba Inu project, tweeted about how much he is enjoying the adoption of $SHIB in Venezuela after a $SHIB HODLer based in Venezuela told him about another new business (called “El Bunker”) that had just started accept $SHIB as a means of payment.
The same source announced on November 24 that there was a special “Shiba Zone” being built in Venezuela, where every merchant accepts $SHIB.
Several days later, we had more details about the Shiba one, namely that it will consist of more than 10 businesses and it will be located in the Bolívar State.
Then, on December 10, the Shiba Inu community found out that there were now 100 businesses in Venezuela accepting $SHIB and the 100th one is “Hotel la Estación Tucacas” in the island Morrocoy.
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.
