Shiba Inu Hits a New ATH, Here is Why

2021 will be remembered by most as the year of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), which blew up as much as DeFi did in 2020. And, like the blockchain between 2015 and now, people are still discovering new use cases for NFTs and getting new ideas on how to use them, so there will be a lot more development there in years to follow.

However, 2021 was also a year of memecoins, which exploded even more following Dogecoin’s meteoric rise in the early months of the year. The stars have aligned perfectly for DOGE, which used the power of its extremely loyal and supportive community, Elon Musk, and even a GameStop short squeeze incident to boost its price and get larger than ever before.

This, of course, inspired the creation of an entirely new sector of crypto, which is how memecoins were born. Only a year ago, DOGE was almost alone in this sector, but today, there is at least a dozen fairly popular coins out there. Even so, it is clear that none is bigger than Shiba Inu (SHIB), other than Dogecoin itself, of course. But, given SHIB’s own meteoric rise over the past few days, even DOGE’s leadership is now being brought into question.

What is Shiba Inu?

Just like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu is a meme cryptocurrency. This means that it was created as a joke, with no specific use case in mind or a problem to fix in the world. It was just made, inspired by a meme, or rather, another cryptocurrency that was inspired by a meme — DOGE.

While most memecoins emerged after DOGE’s major price surge earlier in 2021, SHIB is actually a bit older, first coming out in August 2020, likely also due to DOGE getting noticed due to Elon Musk’s involvement with the crypto space at the time. But for some reason, it is attracting more attention and hype than even DOGE did. At the time of writing, SHIB ranks as the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, while DOGE itself dropped to the 11th position.

Shiba Inu is also dominating the news media sites, as it skyrocketed past some major coins like LINK, UNI, and DOT.

Shiba Inu’s price performance

Shiba Inu emerged as a DOGE killer, and while that seemed like an impossible goal at the time, the coin already outperformed Dogecoin when it comes to market cap. Its price, on the other hand, is a different story.

Back when it originally emerged, SHIB’s price was so low that it was almost non-existent. For months following its release, its volume was fluctuating from only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Things finally changed in mid-April, when it started seeing its first minor price spike which took it from $0.0000002159 to $0.0000003768.

The coin then saw a correction which took it back down for a few weeks, only to skyrocket again in early May. This time, however, SHIB truly took off, reaching $0.00003389. At this point, SHIB became recognized as one of the biggest memecoins, and potentially the biggest one after Dogecoin itself.

Unfortunately for the crypto, this was the moment when the mid-May price crash happened, forcing it back below $0.00001, which then acted as its major resistance for the rest of May, as well as the entirety of June, July, August, and September. Once Bitcoin started its recovery in early October, SHIB started skyrocketing also, indicating that the coin is in great correlation with BTC, or maybe the crypto market as a whole.

The resistance at $0.00001 was breached with ease around October 4th, and the coin surged to the next one which is also encountered before, at $0.00003. After fighting this level between October 7th and October 23rd, it finally broke it and skyrocketed over the last 5 days, reaching a new all-time high only hours ago.

SHIB’s new milestone is at $0.0000826, which came after a weekly price surge of over 130%. In the last 24 hours, the coin went up by more than 20%, although it is worth noting that it saw a significant correction after trying to breach the resistance at $0.00008. Still, it currently sits at $0.00006, which is miles above where it was a week ago, let alone a month ago.

Why did SHIB surge?

As it is well known in crypto, digital coins that are not stablecoins do not have an underlying asset that would give them value, which means that they are only as worth as people think they are worth. For typical cryptos, their worth is measured by how useful or advanced they are.

When it comes to memecoins, however, they don’t have particular use cases — certainly anything beyond what Bitcoin could offer on its first day, other than better speeds. So, for these coins, it is all about the popularity and memes, which Shiba Inu managed to expertly use to its advantage.

The coin was recently reported as the 3rd most Googled crypto in 2021, only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. SHIB was also added to Coinbase’s exchange, also due to the community’s demand, which helped boost its price even further, but more importantly, it made it more available, as well as more popular. In return, this inspired other exchanges to keep adding it, including even Robinhood, potentially.

The surge actually comes due to a petition to have the coin listed on Robinhood’s platform, with the community arguing that the exchange listings make the coin easier for investors to purchase, and a debut on Robinhood could help to drive excitement for SHIB even higher among traders.

While nothing is certain as of yet, Robinhood seems to be at least considering adding it to its platform, which is not that strange given that the coin that was supposed to be a joke just skyrocketed by over 777% in the last 30 days.

Many have been asking whether or not Shiba Inu can reach $1 due to this popularity, but Don Guo, the CEO of Broctagon Fintech Group, believes this to be impossible. According to him, there simply “isn’t enough money in the world” to push SHIB price to $1. He said earlier this month that it would take “one quadrillion market value” for Shiba Inu to climb to $1, and even though the crypto industry has achieved some impressive things so far, this is something that is, and will remain beyond its capabilities.

In any event, SHIB price has made history today, as it not only reached a new ATH, but it surpassed DOGE, entered the top 10 cryptos by market cap list (with a market cap of over $40 billion) and it all happened in the same day. This is the second time that a joke coin stopped being a joke, and it will likely inspire the surge and maybe the creation of new memecoins, while investors will definitely start considering them with a lot more attention and care from now on.

To learn more about this project visit our Investing in Shiba Inu guide or our How to Buy Shiba Inu guide.