The Shiba Inu cryptocurrency token leapt in price on Monday to its highest value in months.
The dog-themed token was up around 50 percent over the past 24 hours as of 7:00 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, worth $0.000013 with a market cap of roughly $5.1 billion according to CoinMarketCap data.
It is unclear why Shiba Inu has increased in price so sharply. Cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile and can rise and fall in price rapidly. Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the dangers and risks associated with trading them.
Shiba Inu’s rise in price sent waves through the token’s feverish fanbase, with many taking to Twitter to urge one another to hold onto their tokens rather than sell them for profit. Of course, some used the cryptocurrency term “hodl.”
“Don’t sell your Shiba,” insisted one. “Hodl onto it so we can continue to see the price [rocket emoji] even higher.”
The cryptocurrency’s active Reddit community also rallied on the news, posting memes encouraging one another not to sell and discouraging “paper hands”—a term used to describe someone who sells an asset shortly after it has made a profit in order to avoid the risk of it losing value again. With crypto trading, that risk is very real.
It’s not the first time that Shiba Inu has risen in value sharply. The token did so back in May this year, when its value multiplied over the space of a couple of days from a fraction of a dollar, around $0.0000015, to its all-time high of $0.000038 on May 10.
However, as tends to happen with sharp crypto rises, the high was short-lived. The token’s price plummeted throughout the rest of the month and has since settled at around $0.000006 before this week’s jump.
Shiba Inu is one of many dog-themed cryptocurrency tokens to have been launched recently following the popularity of Dogecoin—the cryptocurrency that was created as a joke in 2013 but ended up accruing both value and fans over the years to become one of the world’s top tokens—and Elon Musk‘s involvement in the cryptocurrency sphere.
The cryptocurrency market has had a particularly volatile year in 2021. It reached its all-time high in May with a total value of around $2.5 trillion. Then followed a crypto bloodbath, with coins sharply losing value through until mid-July. By then, the market had roughly halved in value, CoinMarketCap data shows.
The market made a sharp recovery through late July and September, and is currently valued at just under $2.2 trillion.
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