What is Shiba Inu?

Last edit: February 27, 2023
Author: Gunavarshini
Reading time: 12 minutes

If you’re looking for a new pet dog, let’s just say you’re probably at the wrong place.

Shiba Inu is a decentralized cryptocurrency created in August 2020 which lives on the Ethereum blockchain. The name comes from the fox-like Japanese hunting dog that is known for its agility and good nature.

Another theory is that the project capitalized on the popularity of Dogecoin, another cryptocurrency which also uses a Shiba Inu as its mascot.

Because of its similarity to the popular memecoin, Shiba Inu has been dubbed as another “shitcoin” (excuse the language) which ultimately means the coin does not have any value.

However, things took a turn when Shiba Inu decided to establish their decentralized exchange, the ShibaSwap.

Key Points

The team and community supporting the Shiba Inu coin are called the ShibArmy.
The Shiba-Inu is a 100% community-based, cryptocurrency “experiment”.
The Shiba Inu has 3 founding principles which are:

Create a project out of nothing
The community started fresh and had never collaborated before.
They LOVE the Shiba Inu dog.

From Shitcoin to a Serious Crypto Contender

While many would still call the Shiba Inu a memecoin, there are some who believe this crypto has grown to establish itself in the crypto space and should be taken seriously.

Shiba Inu’s goal is to be a successful decentralized spontaneous community building and aims to be a revolution against centralisation.

The belief is that “collective decentralization” can bring drastic changes to the way things are done now.

An example of this can be seen during the Gamestop and AMC sudden rise in 2021 when average traders decided to bet against the wall street guys.

Ultimately, both sides lost a lot of money but it shows that the small guys can beat the big guys when they work together as a community united under one cause.

The only downfall is that the stock market has a centralized bureaucracy and thus, these events are a rarity.

What if a decentralized community was established instead?

That’s where Shiba Inu hopes to come in and shake things up.

The Shiba Inu is now reinventing itself to include a decentralized exchange and even an NFT incubator.

It’s more than just a token with a dog on it now. They are also rounding up developers to build a layer-2 solution to cut off dependence on the Ethereum network.

Alone, We Can Do So Little ; Together, We Can Do So Much

The foundation of Shiba Inu is based on a decentralized community. This was iterated by the founder, Ryoshi who said that a “collective decentralization" can be so much more stronger than what a centralized team could create”. Thus, the Shiba Inu is nothing without its community that gives it its purpose.

“The Shiba Inu is also known as the Dogecoin Killer.”

One of the best things about Shiba Inu is their faithful supporters who call themselves the ShibArmy who back up the token despite crypto crashes and bear markets. The community keeps the conversation alive on multiple social media sites like Reddit, Discord and Twitter.

The community is active in giving suggestions for improvisation and are even actively involved in contribution to the Shiba Inu ecosystem through SHIBcon, game development and increasing the acceptance of the SHIB from companies.

How does Shiba Inu work?

The ecosystem is powered by Ethereum and the SHIB coin runs on the Ethereum blockchain thus, it is known as an ERC-20 token. The Ethereum blockchain was chosen by the founder for its already secure, well-established and decentralized.

The goal is also to have the project grow without having regulations limiting its expansion. This way, SHIB token holders can hold it in their wallets and transact freely without moderation.

The ETH blockchain also allows it to develop smart contracts which are now allowing Shiba Inu to develop a DEX called ShibaSwap and an NFT marketplace.

ShibaSwap allows users to stake their SHIB tokens for BONES which is the governance token for the exchange.

BONES is another “Dogecoin Killer'' in-the-making, allowing holders to vote on upcoming proposals through the token.

The only way to mine BONES is through the staking of the SHIB token in the ShibaSwap platform so we can say BONES is rather exclusive.

In addition to the DEX platform, Shiba Inu also launched an NFT project called the NFT Art Incubator which allows creatives to move away from traditional forms of art and honor ingenuity and individuality.

What Can You Do With SHIB?

With the introduction of the ShibaSwap, SHIB holders can now use the DEX to stake their tokens and create passive income. The ShibSwap consists of 6 features that incorporate the use of the token.

1. DIG

This is a liquidity pool where you can deposit tokens in pairs according to the pools or even create your own pool. Users can expect to receive rewards in ShibaSwap liquidity pool (SSLP) tokens.

2. WOOF

This feature allows SSLP holders to cash out the tokens in exchange for BONES.

3. BURY

Here users can stake their SHIB tokens to generate high interest yields of up to 814% in BONES tokens.

4. SWAP

This allows users to swap their existing crypto tokens for another token.

5. BONEFOLIO

This helps users to track their yield returns and look for good interest rates.

6. NFTs

This is a trading platform for over 10,000 NFTS that are shiba-themed, called Shiboshis. A haven for NFT enthusiasts!

Shiba Inu vs Dogecoin

The Shiba Inu being a dog-themed cryptocurrency is often compared to the well-known memecoin, Dogecoin.

Dogecoin was established in 2013 as a way to make fun of the hype around Bitcoin. It was created by founders Billy Markus from IBM and Jackson Palmer from Adobe.

This token was built on its own Dogecoin blockchain and was based around a meme that was famous that year. The meme features a Shiba Inu dog with texts surrounding it written in broken english.

These texts were meant to represent internal monologues going on inside the dog’s mind.

The coin’s performance was relatively flat for many years until it exploded in 2021. Now it is the 11th largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap and has huge celebrity endorsements from people like Elon Musk and Snoop Dog.

Let’s look at some comparisons between the two:

Purpose

While many call the Shiba Inu a memecoin, its purpose for establishment is quite different to the Dogecoin. The Dogecoin was established from a joke intending to mock Bitcoin and the Doge meme.

However, Shiba Inu was created as a medium of exchange and now has other related tokens along with 100% decentralized community-oriented upcoming projects.

It aims to be a successful community-established cryptocurrency.

Number of coins

The number of coins issued for Dogecoin is unlimited and it doesn't have a capped limit of coins. However the yearly issuance is 5 billion tokens.

Shiba Inu has 1 quadrillion tokens and over 40% had already been burned.

Dogecoin is said to be infinitely inflationary while Shiba Inu had already burned over 40% of their coins and have outlined a burning mechanism to ensure its deflationary tokenomics.

The Musk Effect

Both Shiba Inu and Dogecoin have benefited from Elon Musk’s tweets. Elon Musk, often dubbed the "Dogefather" and the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, always had an influence over the cryptocurrency markets. All he had to do was create a single tweet and the token soars to the moon.

Dogecoin’s price benefited from three separate tweets made in 2021 where Elon professed his love for DOGE which caused Dogecoin to fly up to 50% within the same day.

The same happened with Shiba Inu although indirectly.

Elon Musk tweeted about his new Shiba Inu dog called Floki. These tweets somehow suggested that he switched alliances from Dogecoin to Shiba Inu and SHIB proceeded to soar as expected. Either way, both tokens had the Musk effect work in their favor.

Who Started Shiba Inu?

Ryoshi was the founder of Shiba Inu but he remains anonymous to this day.

“Ryoshi in Japanese translates to fisherman”

The early days of Shiba Inu started on Medium.com where Ryoshi published the first few projects on Shiba Inu.

However, most of the work now had been handed over to the developers within the community.

Once the token gained traction, Ryoshi had deleted his blog and his tweets. One of his last blog posts dated 29th May had mentioned this:

“I have said from the beginning, I am a nobody, I am not important. The efforts to unmask my “identity” even if successful would be underwhelming. I am just some guy of no consequence tapping at a keyboard and I am replaceable. I am Ryoshi”

Ryoshi stands by the decentralization of Shiba Inu and even mentioned that he does not hold any Shiba Inu tokens to remain completely impartial to his creation.

According to him, Shiba Inu belongs to no one person but to the community.

Shiba Inu’s Philanthropy

Shiba Inu’s founder reportedly gave away almost half of the entire supply of its tokens to Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin. This was initially seen as a marketing strategy to associate Shiba Inu with Ethereum.

On the 12th of May 2021, Vitalik had donated 10% of the total supply of Shiba Inu to India’s Covid Relief Fund at a time when India was facing one of its worst Covid-19 outbreaks. This was recorded as the biggest donation thus far made with crypto worth about 1 billion US dollars at the time.

The other 40% held by Vitalik was then burned just a week later, leaving only about 50% of Shiba Inus supply in circulation. This is a pretty good move for deflationary purposes.

Shiba Inu is also actively involved with other charitable causes such as the Shiba Inu Rescue Association. They have a page with Amazon Smile that users can explore and indirectly donate to the organization.

A portion of the profits are donated to rescue efforts for Shiba Inus which are a breed of dog sometimes neglected and abandoned for their sometimes aggressive and stubborn nature.

Important Moments for Shiba Inu

August 1th 2020 - Shiba Inu was created with 1 quadrillion tokens minted. 50% of these tokens were then given to Vitalik Buterin.

March 14th 2021 - Elon Musk send out a tweet, “I’m getting a Shiba Inu #resistanceisfutile.” This caused Shiba Inu’s prices to go to the moon as crypto fans would say.

April 30th 2021 - The official whitepaper “WoofPaper '' for Shiba Inu was published and it's a good read!

May 10th 2021 - Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges to date, listed Shiba Inu as a trading pair. BitForex and Kucoin listed SHIB, the token.

May 12th 2021 - Vitalik Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens to India’s Covid Relief Fund. On the same day, Fortune magazine came out with an article discussing Shiba Inu, the Dogecoin Killer.

May 16th 2021 - Vitalik Buterin burns the rest of the SHIB tokens he had in hand.

July 6th 2021 - ShibaSwap was launched.

September 16th 2021 - Coinbase listed SHIB

November 1st 2021 - SHIB briefly takes over Dogecoin in terms of market cap.

Future Plans For Shiba Inu “Ruffmap”

According to the “Woofpaper” which is Shiba Inu’s version of a whitepaper, the Ruffmap which details their roadmap to upcoming exciting plans is top-secret (bummer!)

However here are a few sneak peaks to what they are working on:

Integrate all Shiba Inu products into one united system for future success.
Launch the ShibaSwap and NFT project Incubator to have actual real world applications.
Launch a special token -TREAT which comes with some special features!
Add more token pairs into ShibaSwap.
Establish BONE as a governance token and DOGGY DAO as a governance system

How to buy SHIB?

SHIB is now available at most centralized cryptocurrency exchanges which include the following:

If you are planning to buy it on a decentralized exchange, where better than ShibaSwap?

All you have to do is connect your crypto wallet to the exchange. There are three options for wallets which are Metamask, Wallet connect and Coinbase wallet.

You will have to first buy Ether (ETH) through the wallet and then swap it with SHIB on ShibaSwap.

Price action For Shiba Inu

While Shiba Inu is currently in the top 15 tokens listed per market cap, it still responds heavily to speculation and news.

Social media activities such as tweets from celebrities have a significant impact on Shiba Inu’s price movements. In addition, the price of Bitcoin also plays a role in its peaks and valleys.

However, there are lots of future projects coming up for the Shiba Inu ecosystem which may affect the price of SHIB in the future.

Final Thoughts On Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu is a decentralized cryptocurrency that was created in August 2020 and lives on the Ethereum blockchain.

While it was initially dubbed a "shitcoin" due to its similarity to the popular Dogecoin memecoin, Shiba Inu has grown to establish itself in the crypto space and has a loyal community of supporters called the ShibArmy. T

he foundation of Shiba Inu is based on a decentralized community that gives the token its purpose. The ecosystem is powered by Ethereum and the SHIB coin runs on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing it to develop smart contracts and a DEX called ShibaSwap.

The community is active in giving suggestions for improvisation and is involved in contribution to the Shiba Inu ecosystem through SHIBcon, game development, and increasing the acceptance of the SHIB from companies.