What Fuelled Shiba Inu’s Sudden Rise And Then Brought It Down?

Shiba Inu, a meme coin promoted as the “Dogecoin killer”, soared to record highs over the weekend to become the 11th-biggest cryptocurrency in terms of market value. The rise was fuelled mainly by two reasons. One, there were unconfirmed rumours floating in the crypto world that the coin will soon be listed on the popular stock trading app, Robinhood. The other reason for its rapid rise was tech billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted a photograph of the SHIB token going to the Moon. However, the Shiba Inu rally was short-lived.

Musk tweeted the Shiba Inu photograph on October 18, when the token was trading at $0.000026 (Rs. 0.0020). His tweet pushed the coin to gradually gain in value. On Saturday, it was trading around $0.000027. In the next 24 hours, it was up nearly 50 per cent to reach a high of $0.000044 (Rs. 0.0033), according to CoinMarketCap.

Meanwhile, a petition on Change.org implored Robinhood to list SHIB on its platform. It garnered almost 3 lakh signatures. This led to speculation that the platform may consider the request.

Then, one of the Shiba Inu Twitter accounts got excited and asked Musk how many SHIB tokens he owns. Musk gave an unambiguous and definitive answer, “None.” With that, the meme coin started to lose its gains. At the time of writing this report, Shiba Inu was trading at $0.000038 (Rs. 0.0029). With that, it also slipped to the 13th spot on the list of largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Also, Musk, a known Dogecoin supporter, had previously supported the Shiba Inu coin by tweeting a photograph of a dog sitting on a Tesla car. Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 by someone who uses the name Ryoshi, and has promoted it as a “Dogecoin killer”. It aims to be the Ethereum-based replacement to Doge tokens. Its supporters claim that Shiba Inu is more “community-driven” than its counterpart and supports mostly artistic projects like non-fungible token (NFT) art incubators.