Shiba Inu is one of the meme cryptocurrencies in the market that has been showing its strong ambitions in the market since its emergence and less than a year ago it turned heads after sponsoring the ETH Toronto event in Canada.
Being the second biggest meme coin by the market cap size, its developers continue to expand its ecosystem, add more utility, new features and partnerships to increase adoption.
Shiba Inu’s enigmatic creator Ryoshi
The Shiba Inu (SHIB) coin was created in 2020 and released into the market in August that year by a team of developers with a mysterious founder Ryoshi standing behind them. Some believe that Ryoshi and the mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto were not individuals but groups of developers.
SHIB was launched on top of the Ethereum blockchain and it began trading on the Uniswap dex (decentralized exchange). The creators were ambitious to repeat the success of Dogecoin (DOGE) which was built as a joking copy of Bitcoin and launched in 2013.
Unlike Bitcoin and Dogecoin with their Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, Shiba Inu runs on the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, which means that coins do not get mined gradually but are generated all at once.
Ryoshi, who hid from the public and only communicated to the community through Twitter, sent half of the quadrillion SHIB supply to the Ethereum leader Vitalik Buterin as a present. In May 2021, Buterin burned almost all of that present by sending a massive 410 trillion SHIB to dead wallets.
Later he would admit that he did not believe in the future of this meme cryptocurrency and so he wanted to get rid of it. Besides, he later admitted that he did not want to bear the responsibility of holding that many coins of another cryptocurrency project.
However, he sent the rest of the half-quadrillion to a crypto charity based in India to help them fight the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic that struck India heavily, taking a big death toll.
Originally, Shiba Inu is a Japanese dog breed from the Dogecoin meme. SHIB also uses, if not exactly Kabosu but a dog of the same breed as its mascot. The Shiba Inu’s white paper is called the “woof paper” and it describes how SHIB can be used to “dig” or provide liquidity for “Puppy Pools”, stake, swap tokens, generate returned called “Woof” and also gradually burn the remaining half of the SHIB supply by moving them to dead-end addresses, where they get locked forever.
This feature was introduced in April 2022, responding to numerous requests coming from the coin’s community. They wished to decrease the remaining SHIB supply so that the meme coin could become scarce and see its price skyrocket in the future. Now, the SHIB community burns tiny amounts of meme coins every day and this year the SHIB team also burned several tens of billions of these meme coins.
The Shiba Inu community began to expand promptly and it quickly started to be referred to as the “Shib Army.”
Ryoshi disappears, Shytoshi Kusama takes the lead
In May 2022, Ryoshi published a Medium post, saying that he intends to leave. He removed all public messages on Twitter and other social media, following the example of Satoshi Nakamoto, who also left Bitcoin in the hands of eager developers and has never come back. Some say that Ryoshi made that decision after a big dispute with the other developers of his project.
The leader’s place was quickly taken by an early SHIB investor Shytoshi Kusama who since then has been the lead of the project. Similarly to Ryoshi, he also prefers to use a pseudonym when communicating with the SHIB army online.
Meanwhile, SHIB began to expand its adoption and by now it is accepted for payments by many retailers and payment gateways that convert crypto into fiat, also work with it. Thus, the meme coin has been gradually leaving behind accusations of being nothing but a “pump and dump” scheme.
The SHIB price spiked by roughly 40% in September 2021 when Coinbase listed it for trading. In October, the meme coin surged to an all-time high of $0.00008845. By that, a staggering 154,000,000% profit was gained by its holders since the project’s inception.
In March 2023, SHIB developers rolled out a testnet for layer-2 solution on Ethereum called Shibarium (the testnet was referred to as Puppynet). The launch of the mainnet took place in August during the ETH Toronto event where SHIB was one of the sponsors. Aside from SHIB, the ecosystem includes such tokens as BONE and LEASH. TREAT and stablecoin SHI are still in development. The team is also currently working to create the Shiba Inu Metaverse.
Shiba Inu price prospects
Considering all the recent developments within the SHIB ecosystem, all the strategic partnerships and plans of the team to launch the Metaverse and develop a layer-3 solution (recently they raised $12 million US dollars for this purpose), many analysts predict that over the next few years the Shiba Inu price will go to new highs.
This year, the coin is expected to reach an average price of $0.0000359964 and $0.0000389961 at maximum, based on various fundamental factors and technical analysis. In 2025, an average growth is expected to take SHIB to $0.000049995 or even push it as high as $0.000059994. By 2028, this meme cryptocurrency is forecast to trade at $0.0001549845.
