The price of the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency is down from Thursday’s peak, despite a sharp rally on Friday morning.
The dog-themed token has soared in price over the past couple of days, apparently spurred by a tweet from Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, according to a Fortune report.
Musk posted a photo of his new pet dog, a Shiba Inu puppy named Floki, resting in the front trunk of a Tesla car on October 4.
That same day saw the start of a multi-day price rise for the Shiba Inu token, culminating in a peak on October 7 of around $0.000035, according to CoinMarketCap data. Just before the price rise, the token was worth around $0.000008.
The price fell sharply that same evening to around $0.000021, before making some more gains in the early hours of October 8.
As of 9:30 a.m. ET, the token was valued at $0.000025. As such, the token was still riding high compared to its pre-October 4 surge, but its value was down more than 20 percent compared to the same time a day ago, according to CoinMarketCap.
Shiba Inu’s market cap—the total value of all tokens in circulation—was around $11.4 billion at 9:30 a.m. ET.
Cryptocurrencies are notorious for having extremely volatile prices that can rise and fall sharply. Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the risks and dangers associated with trading them.
For example, Shiba Inu hit its all-time high of $0.000038 on May 10 this year, before plummeting in price in a wider crypto market crash.
Shiba Inu is part of a wider cryptocurrency phenomenon involving dog-themed tokens following on from the success of Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was launched as a joke in 2013 by software engineers, but since gathered a serious following and today is among the top ten most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap, with a total value of over $32 billion. Each Dogecoin was worth just over $0.24 on Friday morning.
Musk has endorsed the token a number of times on social media, becoming an influential figure in the world of cryptocurrency. His tweets have often coincided with price rises or falls.
Other dog-themed tokens to have spawned recently include Floki Inu, Shiba Floki, and Baby Floki—all of which appear to have been created off the back of Musk’s announcement back in June this year that he would get a Shibu Inu dog and name it Floki.
Elena Shvetcova/Getty
