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) has surged to twelfth place in the crypto market capitalization charts after gaining more than 50% over 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 lifted off in late U.S. trading when they were hovering around $0.0000225. They surged to top out at $0.0000336 during the morning of Oct 7 before retreating slightly.
The SHIB market cap is now larger 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’s behind the Shiba Inu surge?
The move has even made it to mainstream media with Bloomberg attributing the Shiba frenzy to an Elon Musk tweet earlier this week of his puppy, Floki, which 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 surged by around 8,000 % in the 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 pumping altcoins as he did exactly the same 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 seen interest wane and Dogecoin tumble to 66% from that peak.
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 quadrillion tokens
There was a total supply of one quadrillion SHIB tokens with half of them circulating which explains the minuscule 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% in Uniswap, then gave the other half to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in mid-May who burned them and donated the proceeds to charity.
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