Shiba Inu Spikes as Whales Add to Existing Positions
Prices of shiba inu saw a 10% spike on Tuesday as whales – a colloquial term for large holders of a given asset – added to their positions earlier this week.
One such whale wallet purchased 4 trillion shiba inu’s for $134 million early on Tuesday, according to data from WhaleStats, which tracks data from the top 1,000 Ethereum wallets after excluding known exchange and project wallets.
That wallet now holds more than $144 million worth of shiba inu, which makes up for 26% of its portfolio holdings in Ethereum-based tokens. Metaverse tokens sandbox and GALA, which make up another $122 million of the wallet’s $500 million total value held in ERC-20 tokens, with the rest scattered between tether stablecoins and altcoins like MATIC, enjin and loopring.
The buying boosted prices from a weekly low of $0.000028 on Monday night to a weekly high of $0.000034 on Wednesday morning. Prices have since corrected, but are still up 4% in the past 24 hours. Shiba inu’s price have been in a continuous downtrend after reaching new highs in October, but have since bounced from a resistance-turned-support level of $0.000028.
Shiba-tether chart (TradingView)
Shiba inu, a self-styled dogecoin rival, was founded in mid-2020 when the broader crypto market was seeing an influx of meme projects and food-themed coins like yam tokens. SHIB was written off by many at the time as one of the many meme coin projects that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
But that didn’t stop shiba inu from becoming one of the best performers for early investors.
Token prices skyrocketed 153,857,000% to a record high of $0.00008616 in October 2021 compared to the low of $0.000000000056 in November 2020, according to data from CoinGecko. Shiba inu even broke into the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization in October 2021, surpassing even dogecoin for a few hours at the time.
Moving shiba inu away from a meme coin play
Developers of the Shiba Inu protocol have attempted to move away from the predominantly meme coin narrative in 2020 to introduce new technical services in 2021, which has helped fuel community adoption and prices.
Early 2021 saw the launch of decentralized exchange ShibaSwap, bringing with it decentralized finance (DeFi) services such as staking and lending. DeFi refers to a financial system reliant on smart contracts instead of centralized middlemen that offers services like lending, trading and borrowing to users.
Then, in December 2021, the project’s pseudonymous founder Ryoshi said development for a Shiba Inu-centric metaverse called Oshiverse was in play, following the recent trend of metaverse projects and application in the broader crypto market. Oshiverse would be based on Shibarium, a layer 2 system built atop Ethereum for Shiba Inu, they added.
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Shaurya is an analyst/editor for CoinDesk's markets team in Asia.
