This article is not a joke — this is an article about a parody token that is now a real thing.
There are meme stocks and there are meme tokens.
There is the argument out there that the flood of liquidity is giving these assets their time in the sun.
I am not saying these assets are great to buy and hold long-term, hardly not, but they do offer the volatility for traders to jump in and out of them for a nice profit.
Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB), a popular meme token based on another alternative coin Dogecoin (DOGE), is a decentralized cryptocurrency created in August 2020 by an anonymous person or persons known as "Ryoshi."
SHIB is red hot and that’s been the case literally this whole year so far.
This dog-inspired cryptocurrency is up 140% in the past 7 days and hit an all-time high of $0.00007592.
Shiba Inu Coin now ranks No. 11 among the top cryptocurrencies by market value capping a surge of over 60,000,000% over the past year.
Before investing in any altcoins, it’s important to understand that these coins are a great deal riskier than something like Bitcoin.
It sounds funny just saying that but yes, there are different degrees of risk with different coins.
There has been a lot of hype surrounding the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) movement, but I would say, only deploy capital in altcoins if you are willing to write off the entire investment.
And I’ll say this, it’s a speculative investment in general, so at least do a little due diligence before you take the plunge.
Shiba Inu Coin is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, which means it was developed on the Ethereum blockchain, rather than its own blockchain.
Ryoshi decided to launch SHIB on Ethereum (ETH) because it’s “already secure and well-established,” according to the SHIB white paper, or, as its community calls it, “woof paper.”
I have gone on record saying that Ethereum will go higher than Bitcoin in the future because it’s that attractive platform that every DeFi developer wants to build on, and SHIB is just one iteration of that.
Developers also choose to roll out their projects using the ETH platform because it’s way cheaper than building a platform from scratch.
SHIB has a total supply of 1 quadrillion.
Ryoshi is on record saying he doesn’t have any SHIB, and nearly half of its supply is locked in a liquidity pool on decentralized exchange Uniswap.
The rest was sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
According to SHIB’s white paper, Ryoshi sent tokens to Buterin with hopes that he’d keep the tokens.
However, Buterin did not.
He donated a significant amount to the India Covid Relief Fund and other charities, which goes to show that now all Covid Relief Funds are created equal.
This is not a joke, and some people might be laughing when they read what this coin is based on.
That is why altcoins may require additional caution due to their differences from something like bitcoin, including their structure, supply, and utility.
SHIB supporters might point to a comprehensive ecosystem, which includes smart contract capabilities; NFTs, or nonfungible tokens; and opportunities for liquidity mining, to name a few, that offer utility beyond community.
Another juicy piece of news saw rising support for a Change.org petition urging trading platform Robinhood to list SHIB on the broker’s platform.
The petition has harvested 334,500 signatures so far.
Being able to trade SHIB on a massive platform Robinhood would be another 50% leg up for the price of SHIB.
A Robinhood spokesperson declined to comment on this request.
When asked by analysts, CEO of Robinhood Vladimir Tenev was noncommittal to accommodating SHIB on Robinhood, but the bigger it gets, the more momentum it gains for listing it.
That’s the thing about these altcoins, they can come out of nowhere, and an even “fake it till you make it,” SHIB is making people rich and all that would have taken is a few hundred-dollar investment in January.
Now the secret is out about SHIB, I would scale in slowly, but don’t bet the ranch on this speculative bet and prepare for high volatility.
