What happened
Over the last 24 hours, the price of the meme token Shiba Inu (SHIB -0.85%) has risen. The cryptocurrency is more than 3% higher as of 3:30 p.m. ET today, as cryptocurrencies bounced and news spread that Shiba Inu could be launching more projects on its network.
So what
Shiba Inu has been rising over the last couple of days as the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC 0.86%), and the rest of the crypto market has rebounded. Bitcoin as of this writing is up roughly 12.5% over the past five days.
Yesterday, the lead developer of Shiba Inu, Shytoshi Kusama, said in a blog post that Shiba Inu is planning to launch a stablecoin project called Shi, a reward token, and a new set of collectibles for the metaverse.
Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to a commodity or fiat currency. There are also algorithmic stablecoins that aren’t backed by anything but track certain commodities or currencies.
“We’ve seen independent development from a group of developers in our decentralized network,” Kusama wrote. “They’ve submitted a version of Shi that seems to avoid the issues found in other moonshots, while allowing Shi to be used to counter and balance payments that need to be done without market fluctuations.”
Shiba Inu’s reward token will be called “Treat.” The purpose of this token, according to Kusama, is to help level the planned stablecoin, as some stablecoins use sister cryptocurrencies to help the stablecoin retain its peg. Treat tokens will also be used for rewards in the metaverse relating to Shiba Inu’s collectible card game.
Now what
While the stablecoin project sounds interesting, Shiba Inu is likely rising in line with the rest of the crypto market. However, I would continue to advise investors to avoid the token, as it has never had any real-world use case or technical advantage over other cryptocurrencies.
