Losses for Shiba Inu coin holders are mounting on Friday as the memecoin has fallen below its average break even price of US$0.00036. The global cryptocurrency market has continued its slide today, losing 5% of its market capitalization.
Shiba Inu, a one-time top 10 cryptocurrency that entered the prestigious ranks in an October bull run to breach all-time highs, is nearing the complete reversal of its furious rally, trading at US$0.000035 at press time. The Shiba Inu coin is now 60% removed from its peak.
57.4% of addresses are still enjoying profits, while 33.7% of addresses are suffering losses. However, SHIB holders have experienced steep drops from its October records of over 90% of addresses in the green, which has been only achieved twice in its existence, according to data from crypto intelligence firm IntoTheBlock.
The underperformance may have come as a disappointment for the SHIB Army — its supporters — after a flurry of development-related news hit the airwaves.
According to its anonymous founder known as Ryoshi, Shiba is scheduled for a massive burn in the coming weeks as the ecosystem looks to dive into blockchain gaming and the metaverse.
But unlike the often associated “joke” narrative that has shadowed Shiba Inu since its inception, Shiba Inu developer Shytoshi Kusama’s recent announcement of adding American video game publishing titan Activision’s former VP of technology’s to its bench as a consultant of Shiba Games hints at real world use cases coming to the previously useless memecoin.
Shiba Inu has also signed an agreement with publicly listed Australian video game developer PlaySide Studios (ASX:PLY). Interestingly, PLY shares rose by 4.8% since the Dec. 8 announcement while SHIB continued to fall, including a 6.2% drop in the last 24 hours.
Dognapper
The announced Shiba Inu coin burn may reduce the amount of Shiba Inu coins in circulation. But Shiba Inu is not a stranger to burning its supply. Token holders frequently send SHIB to its burn address, and sometimes, they gather for burn parties.
Even with the frequent burns, over 549 trillion Shiba Inu coins are currently in circulation. A lot of coins have to be burnt for the deflationary currency’s supply to level with the inflationary leader of the memecoin pack Dogecoin, which has around 132 billion tokens in the market.
Not all memecoins can feel safe this week, after crypto exchange BitMart suffered a US$200 million hack that stole an array of memecoins last weekend. The hacker got away with around 29.4 trillion SafeMoon (US$47.96 million), 1.8 quadrillion BabyDoge (US$2.78 million), 15.4 billion Floki (US$2.03 million), 597 trillion Saitama (US$25.7 million), and 893 billion Shiba Inu coins (US$30.89 million), to name a few. All stolen cryptocurrencies were from the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, and major altcoins including Binance Coin and MATIC were looted.
“Hacks expose vulnerabilities in an exchange’s security systems, causing investors to lose confidence. If it’s a large exchange, this could impact confidence in the market as a whole,” Huobi director of global strategy Jeff Mei told Forkast.News in a written response. “This particular BitMart hack does not appear to have a significant impact on market activity, but it does act as a warning to both cryptocurrency investors and the industry as a whole.”
Huobi has come out to offer monitoring its exchange inflows of stolen assets while BitMart has vowed to compensate its affected users.
Mei adds that Huobi has not received any suspicious reports relating to the hacked funds.
The hacker has not been found at press time.
