Shiba Inu: The Best Of The Good Boys

Thesis Summary

Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD) has seen some price volatility over the last few weeks. Although this started as a memecoin, this is now a flourishing ecosystem with a lot of support from users and developers. The launch of Shibarium could mark a great leap forward for SHIB. Having said that, given the risks of a coin like SHIB, I will wait for a confirmation that the broader crypto market has bottomed before I dip my feet.

Price Action

Over the past few weeks, the price of meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) has seen an upward movement, which is sparked mainly by an increase in the token’s burn rate. In just twenty-four hours, between August 23 and August 24, over 200 million SHIB tokens were burned by the Shiba Inu community.

The burn rate of SHIB increased by over 99% as whale wallets burned large amounts of SHIB. In two separate transactions, a wallet sent 111,635,927 SHIB tokens to a burn address. In the first transaction, the mystery wallet sent 61,708,497 SHIB tokens to the burn address, followed by another 49,927,430 SHIB tokens. These burned tokens are forever taken out of the SHIB circulating supply. Over the years, 41% of Shiba Inu’s total supply has been burned. Out of the 999 trillion SHIB that were once circulating, over 410 trillion have been burned.

The Shiba Inu community projects that 111 trillion SHIB tokens could be burned in the next year.

Shibarium is Coming

Shiba Inu is planning to release a layer-2 blockchain on top of Ethereum. SHIB tokens are Ethereum ERC20 tokens. Ethereum has been plagued by high gas fees and occasional slow transaction confirmation. ERC20 tokens that rely on the Ethereum network for transaction processing have been affected by the issues of high gas fees and slow transactions.

With the release of Shibarium, the fees for transactions will be negligible or even zero, according to the developers of Shiba Inu. Shibarium will also feature a SHIB burning mechanism and act as a bridge for other blockchain projects.

The need for a layer-2 solution was ineluctable for the SHIB ecosystem after the launch of Shiboshi NFTs-a collection of 10,000 SHIB-based NFTs. When the Shiboshi NFT collection launched, many users who tried to participate in the minting missed out on owning one of Shiboshi NFTs even after spending gas fees costing hundreds of dollars in some cases.

Shiba Inu’s Ambitious Roadmap

Shiba Inu is transforming, from a mere meme coin, into a full-fledged ecosystem. On the Shiba Inu roadmap, there are plans for a layer-2 solution, a blockchain game, a metaverse project, a DAO platform, and several other interesting projects.

• Shiba Eternity: Eternity is a card game based on SHIB and created in collaboration with PlaySide studio. The game is already available for early testing, in Vietnam only at the moment. The game was showcased at Gamescom 2022.

• Doggy DAO: In a bid to make the growing Shiba Inu ecosystem truly decentralized, Shiba Inu plans to launch a decentralized autonomous organization called Doggy DAO, to give the Shiba Inu community-popularly known as the ShibArmy-voting rights in key future decisions in the Shiba Inu ecosystem.

• ShibaSwap 2.0: ShibaSwap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) which allows users to swap tokens, stake tokens, and add liquidity to pools. Version 2.0 of ShibaShap will see new features, including a SHIB burning portal.

• SHI Stablecoin: A few ecosystems have launched their own stablecoin. Shiba is following in this step with a planned release of its own stablecoin, which will be known as SHI. A reward token called TREAT will also be launched alongside SHI.

• ShibaNet: ShibaNet will be a decentralized marketplace where users will be able to buy and sell goods using the SHIB token. It will run on the Shibarium layer-2 blockchain, leveraging the very low gas fees and high transaction throughput that Shibarium will provide.

• Shib.io Metaverse: The Shib.io Metaverse will feature more than 100,000 plots of digital land, spanning four districts-Growth, Defense, Technology, and Currencies districts. Shiba Inu has partnered with The Third Floor, a long-term collaborator and partner of Marvel Studios in building the Shib.io Metaverse.

Risks

SHIB is down about 80% from its all-time high price, which it reached in October 2021. The whole crypto market, and the stock market, for that matter, is still facing macroeconomic headwinds, such as inflation and monetary tightening. In a recent piece on Bitcoin (BTC-USD), I even discussed how the cryptocurrency could fall to $14,000.

Furthermore, while SHIB has a strong community behind it, this is still a memecoin, and there are many competitors in the space that are arguably better in terms of technology and development.

That said, there is room for a long-term upward trend in SHIB price. There has been a steady increase in its trading volume in the past few weeks as whales have been burning large amounts of SHIB tokens. Besides the burning of SHIB, there have been huge SHIB buy orders, with an example of a whale accumulating over 52 billion SHIB in a single transaction. With the roadmap and releases scheduled for the coming months, new money is bound to enter into SHIB.

Takeaway

Shiba has grown to become a solid project. Hence, Shiba Inu is always in the news for good reasons. The “ShibArmy” is a strong community as evident by their activity on crypto Twitter. The developers of Shiba Inu are highly passionate about the ecosystem and have followed through on the roadmap. Shiba Inu has secured some solid partnerships that other dog-themed cryptocurrencies could only dream of.

SHIB is definitely an interesting token given recent developments, and I like it more than its cousin Dogecoin (DOGE-USD). However, given the risks and volatility, I advise waiting until a bull market is confirmed in the broader crypto space.