The Shiba Inu token is a clear example of how a meme can become a major driving force in the cryptocurrency world.
Although Shiba Inu was not the first (Dogecoin takes the prize in this case), Shiba Inu is a project with greater projection, especially due to the development associated with the project and the various spaces in which it has starred.
But what exactly is Shiba Inu? Keep reading the article here at Bem Informado to understand
Shiba Inu is a “meme coin,” a coin that was created to be a joke coin within the crypto world. The creation of this token dates back to August 2020 and was led by the anonymous “Ryoshi.” It was this user who introduced the meme coin to the world and started a whole revolution. The rest was done by the community that responded to the presentation. Mainly on social media, where characters like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin were just some of the notable personalities that were involved in this whole whirlwind of growth.
The initial idea behind Shiba Inu was to become the “Dogecoin Terminator”, this being the goal that would later lead to the creation of a whole series of associated services that would give it greater long-term utility compared to its arch-rival.
Purpose of the currency
As we mentioned earlier, Shiba Inu’s main goal is to kill Dogecoin and its non-existent innovation. The truth is that Dogecoin is a “frozen” currency. This is because there is no development and innovation team behind it.
In fact, the existing team only maintains the code to keep it running on current operating systems, based on the Bitcoin Core code and little else. Apart from this and the usual DOGE pump&dump, this coin can be considered a dying project. Although, lately, a new fire has been seen in Dogecoin that seeks to change all that, something fueled by the hype injected by a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency world, Elon Musk.
The creator of Shiba Inu, seeing this, decided it was time to deliver the final blow to Dogecoin and to do so launched Shiba Inu on the network Ethereum as an ERC-20. In this way, Shiba Inu would already have some important advantages over Dogecoin, among which we highlight:
- Integration with the Ethereum ecosystem, including the expanding DeFi world.
- Easier to develop services around Shiba Inu without worrying about layer 1 development.
- Easy to interoperate with other blockchains.
- Allow the community to participate more actively in the development of Shiba Inu, not intending to be just a meme, but something much bigger.
The development of these advantages was what later led the SHIBA token to quickly rise in the list of the largest cryptocurrencies, approaching Dogecoin, having the potential to surpass it and finally fulfill its goal.
But with all this, giving a goal and having advantages does not automatically lead to a ban for a project like Dogecoin, which leaves us with a question: How does Shiba Inu plan to achieve all this?
How does Shiba Inu work?
Well, to achieve its goal, Shiba Inu was built based on a very particular and very fashionable functioning at the moment. First of all, Shiba Inu is an ERC-20 token project built on Ethereum, which, as we mentioned, offers enormous possibilities.
However, we note that the fact that it integrates with Ethereum gives it access to the current DeFi boom, something that Shiba’s developers have taken advantage of very well. On the other hand, the fact that it is an ERC-20 token means that when transitioning from Ethereum to Ethereum 2.0, it will be able to take advantage of the full potential of this new network, especially its low fees and speed.
Secondly, Shiba Inu is focused solely on developing new features around the token, leaving aside blockchain development, something in which Dogecoin has a distinct disadvantage. Developing superior blockchain features on Dogecoin is much more complex due to the structure of how it works and the lack of commercial traction that Dogecoin has in the community. This shortcoming is something that Shiba Inu has managed to overcome without much trouble.
Finally, there is the issue of the community and its participation in the project. In Dogecoin, the maintainers have full power over the cryptocurrency, while in Shiba Inu, spaces were created for the community to participate and decide the future of the project. This further boosted the adoption of the project and led to its higher value.
Ethereum, the chosen network for Shiba Inu
The first point of operation for Shiba Inu as a project is the Ethereum network. In the SHIBA whitepaper, they detail that the choice of ETH to deploy Shiba Inu was the choice of its creator to establish a robust foundation for the project. The idea behind the choice is to allow Shiba to scale more easily than if it were a blockchain project built from scratch. the project, token, and improvement for everyone.
We talked about how anyone in the community could build DEXs, cross-chain capabilities, liquidity pools, yield farming, and more on top of the SHIBA token, which would eventually lead to new features for the token and its revaluation. However, there was a serious problem, and that was that Ryoshi would be in possession of all the SHIBA tokens, and this did not help its decentralization.
This is where Ryoshi came up with the idea of doing something that no one had done before: issuing SHIBA and giving 50% of the issuance to Vitalik Buterin so that he could be the guarantor of said issuance. To understand what we are talking about, SHIBA has a maximum issuance that we could consider “crazy”, since in total there will be 1,000,000,000,000,000 SHIBA tokens (one thousand billion tokens). Although, at the time these tokens were created, they were worth absolutely nothing, Vitalik Buterin had 500 billion of this currency in his possession.
The remaining 50% of SHIBA tokens were in Ryoshi’s control and he started doing all sorts of things to get people to earn SHIBA tokens. The result was a rapid boom and the ShibaArmy (as the pro-SHIBA community is known on social media) fueled this growth even further.
The result was a price boom in the token and an unexpected move by Buterin, who donated part of his SHIBA holdings to the Covid Aid Fund of India, a donation valued at US$1.4 billion (and which was sold by India at a bad market moment, at a net value of US$437 million), and the rest of his holdings, he simply burned them. A good deed in which SHIBA played a leading role and an act that in the long run will end up revaluing SHIBA.
Unique features built around the token
The second important part of how Shiba works is related to the functions created to increase the utility of the token. In this sense, the most important efforts are:
- ShibaSwap , a decentralized exchange built for trading, collateralized lending, liquidity mining, NTF market, and yield farming, all on one platform. Thanks to all this, ShibaSwap has managed to reach a TVL of over $400 million, which places it among the largest DeFi projects in the Ethereum community. In addition, ShibaSwap also has its own token (LEASH) with a limited issuance (just over 170,000 tokens), which helps to improve your earnings on the platform.
- A governance system based on a DAO and powered by the SHIBA token and its sister token BONE. This DAO is known as DoggyDAO, and is an effort yet to fully materialize.
- Shiba Rescue, a joint effort with Amazon Smile to help save the lives of Shiba Inu canine friends living in shelters or homeless, in an effort to fund the Shiba Inu Rescue Association.
Now you know how Shiba Inu works and how it has managed to position itself as one of the leading cryptocurrency projects. If all this has caught your attention and you want to buy SHIBA tokens to add them to your portfolio, doing so is very simple.
The quickest way to get SHIBA tokens is through ShibaSwap, where you can use ETH and pretty much most ERC-20 tokens to buy SHIBA tokens. To do this, simply connect your MetaMask wallet and interact with ShibaSwap to make the purchase, without any KYC or signatures. Other DEXes you can use to buy SHIBA are Uniswap and SushiSwap.
Another way to buy SHIBA is on exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, Gate.io, Poloniex or OKEx, where there are pairs available so you can get this token at any time.
