Meme coin Shiba Inu pips Dogecoin to become world’s 8th biggest crypto; jumps 155% in seven days

Shiba Inu was up 41 per cent in the last 24 hours. (Image: shibatoken.com)

Meme cryptocurrency Shiba Inu (SHIB) is on fire. Launched as an Ethereum-based rival to popular meme coin Dogecoin, Shiba Inu has grown a whopping 155 per cent in price just over the past seven days from $0.00002851 to $0.00007445, data from CoinMarketCap.com at the time of filing this report showed. Consequently, its market cap catapulted from $11.2 billion to over $42 billion during the period to become the 8th biggest cryptocurrency in the world, edging out Dogecoin and Polkadot in the top-10 bracket. The meme coin had, in fact, reached its all-time high market cap of $52 billion at 8.54 AM on Thursday morning to become the seventh biggest digital currency before it slipped to the 10th position with a $39 billion market value by 11.09 AM. Shiba Inu was up 41 per cent in the last 24 hours.

“Shiba Inu has soared by more than 1,000 per cent in a month’s time. Most of the growth is driven by huge volumes among retail audiences so much so that the volumes have surpassed that of Bitcoin too on most of the exchanges worldwide. There is strong market anticipation about Shiba Inu being listed on Robinhood which is the force behind the momentum, however, the nature of the coin is also responsible for the sudden rally. At 1 quadrillion, Shiba Inu has been designed to build and drive abundant supply, unlike Bitcoin. So, the current spurt is primarily riding on retail investor sentiments,” Gaurav Dahake, Founder & CEO, Bitbns told Financial Express Online.

580 trillion Shiba Inu coins worth $41.8 billion were traded in the past 24 hours in comparison to 667k bitcoins worth $40 billion in the same time period, data from CoinMarketCap showed. The growth in Shiba Inu is likely on the back of growing support for a Change.org petition urging trading exchange Robinhood to list Shiba Inu coin on its portal. So far, 3.83 lakh signatures have been recorded for the petition.

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“The surge of Shiba Inu token price happened after Elon Musk tweeted the picture of his new pet dog, Floki, who is the same breed as the one we see on the Shiba Inu token. Another reason could be the vociferous support of its followers to get the coin listed on Robinhood. These surges happen often at a whim and a lot of speculation is at the helm, these tokens are called meme coins for they have no intrinsic value but the value being ascribed to them due to these external factors – influencers – make them valuable,” Tarusha Mittal, COO & Co-Founder, OroPocket & UniFarm – Member Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC) told Financial Express Online.

Unlike Bitcoin, which is designed to be scarce, Shiba Inu is intentionally abundant — with a total supply of one quadrillion and its ecosystem supports projects such as an NFT art incubator and the development of a decentralized exchange called Shibaswap, as per description by Coinbase. At the time of filing this report, Shiba Inu was around $7 billion short in market cap to replace XRP – the seventh biggest crypto.

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