Surely You Can’t be Serious.

Let’s start with Albert Camus. His writing is difficult to understand and often depressing. A prominent theme within his works is the idea of the absurd — the inherent meaninglessness of nature and our existence. To truly live and find happiness, one must look into the abyss and laugh.

But if you stare too long or too deep into this abyss, you’ll hear a faint barking sound. Since Dogecoin escaped from this abyss, more and more meme-coins have hit the exchanges. They do not exist because of utility or any unique value propositions. But since Dogecoin’s hype, nothing has captured the attention of day-traders and Redditors more than Shiba Inu.

Like our existence, these tokens simply are. They don’t come with a pretentious premise and can be disastrous to your wallet. They’ve got a strong community behind them and their own meme coin ecosystem. Is Shiba Inu a bubble growing so fast that it will burst, or will it survive and emerge as a bluechip cryptocurrency?

The Promise of Shiba Inu

Problem:
DOGE isn’t as Memetastic as it Could Be

Dogecoin was created as a parody of Bitcoin and only gained prominence through its community. Its meteoric rise was aided by several tweets from Elon Musk, though its momentum has since begun to die down. Dogecoin’s founder Jackson Palmer has long left the crypto scene, criticizing the entire space on Twitter:

“The cryptocurrency industry leverages a network of shady business connections, bought influencers and pay-for-play media outlets to perpetuate a cult-like “get rich quick” funnel designed to extract new money from the financially desperate and naive.”

Solution:
Another Token Based on Featuring this Adorable Japanese Dog Breed!

Yep. That’s how Shiba Inu continues to innovate in the meme space. Many retail investors are banking that SHIB will take them to the moon, promoting it all over Twitter and Reddit. Plus, there will be more meme coins like LEASH and BONE. Perhaps this posturing for wealth is a sign of the times  — a financial and climate crisis. If you can’t buy a house right now, why not buy some SHIB?

A Brief History

A year ago, one man traded 2 ETH (~$8000 at the time) to go all in on SHIB. Within a little while, the value of the SHIB the trader bought skyrocketed to $5 billion. But meteoric rises in riches remain rare and these stories are showing the rare results of gambles paying off. There are way more stories of people losing thousands. Buying at all-time highs now, especially for a meme coin is a risky game.

The Evolution of Meme Coins

Parody is often confusing, with many people happening to take it quite seriously. Take the case of Jonathan Swift, a satirist who wrote an essay called A Modest Proposal in 1729. Here, he suggests that the impoverished would benefit by selling their children to the rich to be eaten. The essay received a backlash from people that didn’t understand it was meant as satire against the aristocracy.

Dogecoin was created as a parody in 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It allowed a lot of people who didn’t have a lot of money to get involved in the cryptocurrency scene. It was intended to parody many new coins that were popping up onto the scene, trying their absolute darndest to differentiate itself. But somewhere down the line, Dogecoin went from parody to a highly volatile speculative asset.

In 2021, high-profile shilling from Elon Musk pumped the price of Doge leading it into the top ten of cryptocurrencies by market size. That’s $35 billion in value tied up in a highly volatile meme currency. Many people made a lot of money by betting on Doge and equally, many lost great fortunes.

Shiba Inu is the first meme token that has broken into the mainstream since Doge’s creation, even surpassing it in terms of market cap. The Dogecoin killer is here, and it is no joke.

Shiba Inu’s Founder

A mysterious founder calling himself Ryoshi launched this humble token in August 2020 as an ERC-20 token. He introduced himself on Medium, writing: “I’ve said from the start, I’m nobody, I’m not important. Attempts to dismantle my “identity”, even if successful, will be disappointing. I’m just a non-consequential guy typing on a keyboard and I’m replaceable.”

They claim that they do not own any Shiba Inu tokens. Normally, you shouldn’t invest in a company or technology without knowing who is behind it. But given that this is an ERC-20 alt-token created as a meme rather than with specific use-cases in mind, it is a tolerable risk.

Roadmap and Utility

Shiba Inu is a deflationary token that hopes to increase its value through burning tokens. Originally, the roadmap wasn’t clear but the currency has managed to differentiate itself from other meme coins of late.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, was sent $6 billion in SHIB by Ryoshi. Buterin burned 90% of these tokens and donated the rest towards a charity. Some speculate that more burning events are in SHIB’s future, lowering the circulating supply of the token and raising its overall value.

Additional Tokens Within the Ecosystem

The Shiba Inu ecosystem is more than just the cute dog-based token. LEASH has been released, with a supply of only 107,646 total tokens. It will offer rewards through liquidity on a decentralized exchange. BONE, which only has 250,000,000 tokens, will act as the governance token for the Doggy DAO, which will make important decisions about the future of the currency.

ShibSwap: DIG, BURY and SWAP Meme Tokens

This dApp is set up for all the loyal SHIB, BONE and LEASH holders. Here, you can DIG to provide liquidity, BURY to stake these tokens and of course SWAP them for each other. This exchange will also allow access to art being developed in the Shiba Inu Incubator as well as NFTs.

ShibSwap and Doggy DAO Are the Future

The development and popularity of the Shiba Inu exchange and its DAO will likely determine whether the cryptocurrency will survive in the long run, or if it will lose out to other memes. There’s no telling what might happen if there’s another large drop in the cryptocurrency market. Will SHIB go to the moon or will it make like a terrible Roland Emmerich disaster movie and crash?

Milestones for SHIB

Shiba Inu peaked in price at the end of October 2021, reaching a high of $0.00008. Now, it has a market cap approaching $40 billion with a large daily trading volume. While a total of 1 quadrillion tokens were minted at the beginning, there are about 550 trillion tokens remaining. Before this current bull run, SHIB was trading closer to $0.00001.

Buy and Store SHIB

Buying SHIB

Due to its recent rise in popularity, Shiba Inu is available on many popular centralized exchanges.

Storing SHIB

Like many other Ethereum-based altcoins, MetaMask is far and away the best application to use as a wallet. For long term storage, transfer it to a wallet on a Ledger or Trezor cold wallet, that can be kept disconnected from the internet. Though with SHIB’s volatility, it might be best to keep it in a hot wallet for quick trading.

The Case for Investing

Pros: Community

Want to meme with a lot of your fellow shills? Join a Discord community and rejoice over cute NFTs and tokens? SHIB might be just the right meme coin for you. In terms of serious gains, SHIB has a very low price so it is possible for it to jump 1000 percent within a week. In addition, investing in LEASH and BONE could give you some gains as a liquidity provider on ShibSwap.

If you’re into absurdism and you’re looking for something meaningless to fight that existential dread, then buy $10 worth of SHIB and laugh right into the abyss.

Cons: Volatility

A lot of people hear about a new token once it gains traction and the price is already pumping up. That means it could just as easily drop in those precious moments. Spending a lot of money because of FOMO on these meme coins could leave you broke. Since people with large followings on Twitter hold substantial sway over this market, your SHIB is at the whims of shills and investors. People panic once they buy something and the price drops immediately. The chain-reaction could be disastrous.

Additionally, the sheer amount of tokens makes it difficult to imagine a future where SHIB reaches a price of $1 per token, without significant burning. Without any real differentiating use-cases or value beyond memes and making money, it could just as easily be overtaken by a Shiba Inu killer.

It is a doge eat doge world after all.

Takeaways

Dogecoin was a simple parody, an imitation of other cryptocurrencies. Shiba Inu was created as the Dogecoin killer, providing you with a Woofing good time but a lot of financial uncertainty and perhaps even bankruptcy. It is impressive that their mysterious pseudonymous founder managed to develop an ecosystem within a year, showing the project’s strength.

There are now two other tokens within the ecosystem, a decentralized exchange where you can stake or provide liquidity, a Doggy DAO where you can vote on future developments, and an NFT art marketplace. But none of these are unique technical innovations that would confer long-term stability to the token. If you do end up buying some SHIB, be prepared to lose it all.

Shiba Inu is simply a bark and a howl within a meaningless, tumultuous existence and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

— Albert Camus

Should You Invest?

Probably not. But if you can’t resist the temptation of buying into the hype at a certain point, just remember to only ever invest as much money as you are willing to lose. That’s good advice for most things in crypto, but it’s especially applicable to this or any other meme coin.

Sure it could still go up because enough people think it’s funny and in that case you’ll be laughing too.

Just don’t get your hopes up.