What Is Shiba Inu?
Shiba Inu (SHIB) is an Ethereum-based meme coin. Shiba Inu dogs are the source of the coin's inspiration. At first, it began as a silly and cute meme coin. However, with time and an extra push of Elon Musk’s tweets, it became pretty popular.
Talking about Musk, his tweets, which stated that he got a Shiba Inu dog, made the Shiba Inu price skyrocket by nearly 300%. It’s crazy how much a simple tweet from an influential person can do. Thus, Elon Musk is one of the main reasons why the coin became so popular and why its value grew.
Shiba Inu is closely related to Dogecoin, Baby Dogecoin, and other crypto assets related to dogs. However, one of the goals of Shiba Inu is to outpace Dogecoin by reaching a higher market cap without reducing the SHIB price.
Before moving further, keep in mind that Shiba Inu is actually a token because it’s based on Ethereum, which means that it doesn’t have its own blockchain. However, everyone refers to it as a coin, so I’ll do the same. Just know that speaking in crypto terms, it’s Shiba Inu token, not Shiba Inu coin.
Shiba Inu Project
From simply being a small meme coin, Shiba Inu turned out to become the whole ecosystem. For instance, the project developed its own decentralized exchange platform called ShibaSwap. The DEX allows users not only to exchange tokens but also to participate in yield farming and liquidity mining activities.
Moreover, Shiba Inu has two more tokens – LEASH and BONE. Talking about the LEASH token, it originated as a rebase token. However, its rebase feature was eventually removed. As of writing this, impressive rewards for providing the token's liquidity are promised to LEASH token holders.
BONE, on the other hand, is the governance token of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. It allows members of ShibaArmy (this is the name of the community) to participate in the decision-making processes in Doggy DAO.
Furthermore, since the Shiba Inu community members love Shiba Inu dogs, the project has established the Shiba Inu Rescue Association. You can give a portion of your Amazon purchases by linking them via Amazon Smile. The Shiba Inu Rescue Association will then distribute these funds to various Shiba Inu rescue projects.
Besides, the project also offers the Shiba Inu incubator. In a nutshell, it’s a decentralized NFT project. It allows artists to create various arts revolving around the coin.
Though it doesn’t stop here, there are much more ideas planned for the project. For example, it’s also planned to create an algorithmic stablecoin called SHI. Though instead of one dollar (like it's the case with most stablecoins), SHI would be pegged to one cent. In an essence, it would be something similar to DAI. It’s planned to release SHI after launching the Layer-2 solution called Shibarium, which is yet another project planned by the Shiba Inu community.
The Story of Shiba Inu
There is a mystery behind the person who founded Shiba Inu coin. Just like with Bitcoin creator, only the pseudonym of Shiba Inu creator is known – Ryoshi. There were some speculations that Vitalik Buterin is the real father of Shiba Inu since half of the supply of the initial Shiba Inu launch was transferred to his wallet. However, he denied these rumors.
What is especially interesting about Ryoshi is that he doesn’t own any Shiba Inu tokens. Overall, he claims to simply be a member of the ShibaArmy without putting any titles on himself or having any major perks.
Talking about the coin itself, at first, it was created mainly as an experiment. The goal of the experiment was to test how the community would handle the governance of the project. The Shiba Inu price was very low at that time.
However, the coin is often referred to as a “Dogecoin killer.” This is because one of Shiba Inu coin’s goals is to outpace Dogecoin.
Besides, it actually has some benefits that might make it better than Dogecoin. One of these benefits is that, unlike Dogecoin, the Shiba Inu coin supports smart contracts, which means that it can have way more functionalities.
What Can You Do With Siba Inu Coins?
The main thing that you can do with the SHIBA coin is bury it. Burying refers to the process of staking. By burying SHIBA, LEASH, or BONE tokens you get xSHIB, xLEASH, and tBONE. These are the minted versions of the coins. xSHIB provides stakers with more BONE tokens and other additional rewards.
By burying SHIB, you can receive 3% of the BONE token made with each new block of data. In addition, you can receive 0.3% of all ETH swap transaction fees processed through ShibaSwap.
Though you can also dig your Shiba Inu coins. The digging process is similar to the process of yield farming. By doing that, your coins are temporarily turned into SHIB SSLP coins. You can earn BONE tokens by digging SHIB SSLP. When you want to un-dig your SHIB, you have to exchange your SHIB SSLP, which serves as a kind of placeholder token, back for your Shiba Inu coins.
Before jumping into the Shiba Inu project (or any crypto project for that matter), it's crucial to do proper research. You can start by analyzing the Shiba Inu price on the graph above.
Shiba Inu Tokenomics
During the initial Shiba Inu coin launch, half of its supply was sent to Vitalik Buterin. The other half was sent to Uniswap. The coins that reside on Uniswap are locked. Vitalik Buterin, on the other hand, burned around 90% of his coin holdings (around $7 billion at that time) and donated the remaining 10% to Covid Crypto Relief Fund in India.
There’s actually an interesting story behind this. First of all, why Vitalik Buterin? Well, he’s one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the only one who still works with the project. His wallet address is public, thus, anyone can send him Ethereum-based tokens.
Shiba Inu developers probably decided that it would be a good idea to send the coins to Vitalik Buterin to simply self-promote. They assumed that, if the face of Ethereum supported their project, then other people would support it too. However, it didn’t turn out as they hoped it would. Vitalik was really skeptical about the Shiba Inu project, which resulted in the whole burning and donating process.
Though something like this never happens without somebody noticing. Ironically, since even major media outlets covered the incident, this turned out to be the best promotion for the Shiba Inu coin, which helped to raise the SHIB price.
