Meme tokens are back in fashion it seems as the Dogecoin spinoff, Shiba Inu, has surged up the market cap charts this week flipping several crypto giants. Shiba Inu (SHIB) jumped to twelfth place in the crypto market cap charts after gaining more than 50% in the past 24 hours.
It is now larger than Binance’s stablecoin, BUSD, with a market cap of just under $15 billion according to CoinGecko. SHIB prices took off at the end of trading in the United States as they hovered around $ 0.0000225. They surged to top out at $0.0000336 during the morning of Oct 7 before retreating slightly.
SHIB’s market capitalization is now greater than that of Uniswap, Avalanche, Litecoin and Chainlink. It is not the highest the doggy meme token has been, however, as it hit an all-time high of $0.0000379 on May 10.
What is behind the wave of Shiba Inu?
The move was even broadcast in mainstream media, with Bloomberg attributing the Shiba frenzy to a tweet from Elon Musk earlier this week from his puppy, Floki, who is a breed of Japanese hunting dog.
One of the many Shiba Inu dedicated Twitter feeds also attributed Musk’s social media posts for the token’s price surge:
“SHIB has now jumped about 8,000% last year! Thanks to @elonmusk “
Another Twitter feed claims that there are now more than 700,000 SHIB holders. Shiba Inu has a similar fanatical fanbase to Dogecoin called the “Shib Army.”
Musk is no stranger to altcoins pumping, as he did the exact same thing with Dogecoin earlier this year. The frenzy that followed saw DOGE prices surge to an all-time high of $0.731 on May 8. The lack of subsequent DOGE tweets from the billionaire entrepreneur has caused interest to plummet and Dogecoin drops to 66% from that high.
In mid-September, Musk tweeted a similar picture of his puppy which resulted in the surge of another meme token spinoff called Shiba Floki (FLOKI) at the time.
Half a billion tokens
There was a total supply of a quadrillion SHIB tokens of which half were circulating, which explains the tiny price. This could also play on the psychology of speculators who can buy millions of them just for a few dollars.
Its anonymous founder “Ryoshi” locked 50% into Uniswap, then gave the other half to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in mid-May who burned them and donated the proceeds to charity.
