Is Shiba Inu Dead?

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Key Takeaways:

• The SHIB token’s market cap (~$4b) is the second-highest of all meme coins, sitting behind only DOGE.
• Shiba Inu has a vibrant ecosystem to bring real-world impact with its support of smart contracts and ecosystem dApps.
• There is an active development team and the team is constantly evolving with Shibarium, the Layer 2 network release.
• Shiba Inu is far from dead and has significant public interest and investment within the crypto community.

Shiba Inu is one of the crypto industry’s most popular meme coins and attempts to toe the line between meme coins while also providing its holders with decentralized finance perks. However, after rising to glory in late 2021, the hype around Shiba Inu has been subdued. So this raises the question – is Shiba Inu dead?

Is Shiba Inu Really Dead?

The simple answer is no, the Shiba Inu project is alive and well due to its significant supply in circulation, large community, real-world applications, and ongoing upgrades and developments.

The way each individual defines a “dead coin” will vary. Some may believe that a cryptocurrency stagnating in growth, or dropping in value, warrants being labeled as dead. In that sense, Shiba Inu (SHIB) hasn’t exactly set the world on fire over the past couple of years since its colossal breakout in 2021.

However, Shiba Inu is a meme coin with an extremely high supply (currently sitting at close to 600 trillion). It is not designed to be a “moonshot” asset – rather, Shiba Inu is a cultural mirror that lets its investors participate in DeFi services while being part of a tight-knight community. SHIB’s price performance makes up only a minuscule portion of the project’s overall framework. Even accounting for its slow growth, Shiba Inu still sits comfortably in the top 20 projects by market cap – while other “dead” coins won’t appear in the top 1,000, if at all.

In addition, most dead projects have been abandoned by investors and developers. Shiba Inu still has an incredibly active community.

• The official Shiba Inu Twitter (@shibtoken) boasts nearly 4 million followers and posts updates every couple of days. This suggests the development team is still constantly looking for ways to expand and optimize the Shiba Inu project.
• A Shiba Inu fan page has nearly a million followers on Twitter.
• The SHIBArmy subreddit has nearly 500k members and sees multiple posts a day. The community also has very active telegram and discord servers.
• There is over USD 1.5 billion worth of SHIB locked on decentralized finance apps, suggesting investors are staking SHIB and contributing to the network.

Based on all this evidence, it is pretty easy to conclude that Shiba Inu is not dead. In fact, this project might be the furthest from the death of any meme coin – possibly even Dogecoin. Shiba Inu undergoes more development and upgrades than any of its competitors, and the project’s EVM compatibility makes it a logical location for ecosystem dApps going forward.

How Could Shiba Inu Fail?

As mentioned above, it is very unlikely that Shiba Inu will be considered a “dead” coin anytime soon due to its incredibly active community, status in the industry, and constant development. However, just like all cryptocurrency projects, any manner of events could cause the project to eventually be abandoned. This includes competition surpassing Shiba Inu, or the developers and community moving on.

Competitors

Shiba Inu considers itself a competitor to Dogecoin and was initially marketed as such upon its release in 2020. The project no doubt has several advantages over Dogecoin – largely that its developers are still active and that it supports smart contracts. At one stage, Shiba Inu even overtook Dogecoin based on market cap. For now, the two coins are co-existing without too much drama. However, Dogecoin has a much longer-lasting legacy and maybe more entrenched in the scene. So if push came to shove and only one meme coin could survive a prolonged crypto winter, Dogecoin might have more staying power.

Additionally, several short-term meme coins have cropped up with similar names to Shiba Inu – think SHIBArmy, ElonDoge, and so on. Some of these assets have sky-rocketed up 1,000%+ in a matter of hours (before inevitably crashing and burning). While most of these projects had their time in the sun and quickly died, one of these may eventually stick and usurp Shiba Inu as the “best of the rest” meme coin.

Development abandoned

Shiba Inu’s biggest calling card over other meme coins is that it has utility. This is thanks to the anonymous team (or individual) who codes and upgrades the project, known as Ryoshi. If Ryoshi were to abandon or move on from Shiba Inu, one of the project’s biggest advantages would come undone. This may result in investors looking to shift their portfolios away from SHIB and to other more active cryptocurrencies.

Shiba Inu’s Rise & Status In The “Real World”

Shiba Inu came about in mid-2020, but it took about a year before the industry started taking notice. As the 2021 bull run kicked into full gear, the price of SHIB shot up an absurd 28 million percent at its peak. Much of this growth was built on speculation and hype, like Dogecoin, as Shiba Inu was still developing much of its DeFi ecosystem at the time.

• Just like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu’s bull run captured the attention of many celebrities, who joined the party as investors. Their entry into the Shiba Inu market only caused the momentum to continue building.
• Nick Carter (Backstreet Boys), Ice-T, and controversial American football player Antonio Brown were just some of the big-name investors.
• SHIB tokens can be used as payment at popular gaming marketplaces like Newegg and GameStop.

The Shiba Inu Ecosystem

As discussed in this article, Shiba Inu has a burgeoning ecosystem with millions of dollars put toward securing the network.

• Shiboshis, a collection of 10,000 Shiba Inu-based NFTs, was released and sold out within half an hour. They can be used in the Shiba Eternity game.
• Shiba Eternity is a F2P NFT card game that can be accessed via Google Play and Apple App Store.
• ShibaSwap is the network’s flagship product (for now). It is a decentralized exchange (DEX) where users can buy and sell SHIB, swap ETH for ecosystem tokens like BONE and LEASH, or stake their assets.

What’s Next For Shiba Inu

The next big step for Shiba Inu is the development and release of Shibarium, the Layer 2 network native to the project. The blockchain protocol was launched onto the Ethereum Mainnet in August 2023 and will continue to be upgraded over the years. In simple terms, the purpose of Shibarium is to solve some of the congestion issues and high gas fees that have long plagued the Ethereum chain – and by extension, Shiba Inu’s ecosystem.

The Layer 2 Chain will inform the next steps of the Shiba Inu project. It will be used to power governance, the platform’s DEX, and any new on-chain applications like the Shiba.io metaverse.

In addition to creating their own L2 chain, Shiba Inu’s development team plans to leverage their blockchain technology to use SHIB as an identity protocol. The specifics of this plan are still unclear, but this would be another step toward real-world utility for the Shiba Inu project, and one further away from “crypto death”