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If you follow cryptocurrency news, you know that the market has been crashing. However, some coins are starting to show signs of recovery — particularly Shiba Inu (SHIB).
As a “meme coin,” Shiba Inu has faced ridicule from some serious crypto investors. But SHIB’s meme power may help the cryptocurrency move back into the black.
Figure 1: Shiba Inu Coin: Can Meme Power Lift This Crypto Coin?
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(Read more from Wall Street Memes: GME, AMC: Is Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio The New Meme Investor?)
Shiba Inu started as a community-driven project. The coin’s founder, Ryoshi, defined the coin at first as “an experiment in a decentralized spontaneous community building.”
The coin’s growth has surprised even its developers. Shiba Inu’s market cap reached $41 billion in October 2021. As the crypto’s community grew from hundreds to thousands of members, the “SHIBArmy” demonstrated that strength lies in numbers.
According to the coin’s white paper, Ryoshi was inspired to create the meme coin after watching the 2021 meme frenzy around GameStop (GME) – Get GameStop Corporation Report and AMC Entertainment (AMC) – Get AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Class A Report.
They noticed that the meme movement’s success was stifled by the bureaucracy of centralized finance:
“2021 opened our eyes to how little control the average person has in the face of these overarching, generational structures when GameStop and AMC stock value exploded seemingly overnight. WallStreetBets tested the waters of what it would look like to disperse control to consumers and inexperienced investors alike.”
Thus, the principles behind Shiba Inu are a cry for independence from a bureaucratic market unfavorable to individual investors.
“In the ever-shifting economic landscape, cryptocurrencies which do not take their independence into their own hands struggle with a tenuous existence.”
Today Shiba Inu is the 15th most valuable cryptocurrency in existence, with a market cap of nearly $7 billion. However, the biggest criticism of the meme currency is its lack of functionality.
Critics attribute this to the fact that Shiba Inu was developed only for trading on the hype of the crypto market. In today’s bearish crypto market, many Shiba Inu investors have migrated to alternative projects such as Bitgert (BRISE), whose value has remained high due to its focus on DeFi, NFTs, and Web 3.0 products.
But those who think that the Shiba Inu community has no concrete plans for its future applicability are mistaken. A few months ago, developers announced that they are working on a project entitled Shibaverse, an immersive metaverse world within the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
Some experts believe this could be big for Shiba Inu and perhaps re-ignite the performance of the meme coin.
Assets often receive the “meme” label because their valuations don’t match their underlying fundamentals. However, ultimately, it’s supply and demand that move asset prices. And sometimes those market forces are unpredictable.
As we’ve seen with meme stocks like GameStop and AMC, when individual investors work together to defeat a supposedly oppressive system, great rallies can occur.
The share prices of these meme assets have skyrocketed to the moon due mostly to high trading volume orchestrated through communities on social media platforms like Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter Inc. Report and Reddit. Shiba Inu’s Twitter profile has more than 3.3 million followers. The r/SHIBArmy community forum on Reddit has more than 474,000 frequently engaged members.
The most valuable meme coin, Dogecoin (DOGE), has roughly the same number of followers on Twitter. However, there are more than 2.3 million members of the r/dogecoin subreddit.
This shows how popular these cryptocurrencies are and the levels of engagement they can achieve even without necessarily having a project with a market-value applicability.
Perhaps a lack of fundamentals doesn’t matter if the demand for meme coins continues to exist, driven by meme investors’ unwavering optimism that SHIB will make it “to the moon.”
(Disclaimers: this is not investment advice. The author may be long one or more stocks mentioned in this report. Also, the article may contain affiliate links. These partnerships do not influence editorial content. Thanks for supporting Wall Street Memes)
Co-producer of The Street’s financial channels: Apple Maven, Amazon Maven and Wall Street Memes. Researcher and operations manager at DM Martins Research.
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