Who let the dogs out!?
What started out as a “meme” or a silly joke has officially taken the trading world by storm. A new digital token is on the rise called Shiba Inu (SHIB), boosting the canine-themed cryptocurrency up to new heights. And by that, we mean that Shibu Inu is now one of the top ten most valuable cryptoassets by market value. It recently hit $40 billion, which means it surpassed Dogecoin (DOGE), the crypto that it was apparently inspired from.
On Monday around midday, Shiba Inu rose by another 10% and has only doubled in value during the last week. This increase is mostly thanks to the trading hustle and bustle last Wednesday which caused it to increase by an incredible 66%.
Despite the token’s recent drastic increase (believe it or not, the past month alone saw a 900% boost), each Shiba coin only costs a small percentage of a cent. So, if you decided to invest $1000 in Shiba Inu around late September, you would have around 20 million coins that would now cost approximately $9000.
Like most cryptocurrencies out there, traders don’t typically use Shiba Inu for commercial transactions. In fact, most investors and experts think of it as a high-risk token, especially since the crypto market is a volatile one. With that in mind, experts gave a warning that investors should tread carefully, especially if they want to invest their money into something that has an anonymous leadership and doesn’t seem to have any functional use, to begin with.
On the other hand, investors may not be deterred all that much because this whole situation is hauntingly familiar. In this year alone, Bitcoin has already doubled in value. It may have had a few plunges here and there, but a single coin now sells for over $60,000.
Although SHIB is currently the talk of the town within the crypto community, you currently can’t trade it through your typical brokers just yet. However, there’s an ongoing petition on Change.org with over 450,000 signatures requesting Robinhood, the mobile trading app, to allow investors to start Shiba Inu trades. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Robinhood does include Shiba trades in the future, as it currently allows Dogecoin trading among many others.
Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev stated last week that the company would “carefully evaluate” the addition of new coins to the platform in a way that doesn’t violate the regulatory requirements. It’s already expected that the crypto market would have a much stricter regulation, but it’s still unclear when this would be put into practice.
At the moment, it seems that there’s not enough investor protection in the cryptocurrency world. In fact, Gary Gensler, chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, even said that it was comparable to “the Wild West.” We can’t say for sure whether this lack of regulation is the reason why tokens like Shiba Inu are receiving spikes, but one thing is clear: what used to be the small fries are rapidly leading the way.
At this time, the Shiba Inu crypto is still shrouded in mystery, and we don’t know much about its founders. According to SHIB’s white paper, an anonymous group (or person) who goes by “Ryoshi” started the token sometime in 2020.
