Why Has Shiba Inu Soared 385% in a Week?

Meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) has leapt 385 percent in the past seven days, doubling its value in just one 24-hour period this week.

Now the world’s 12th largest cryptocurrency, the “dog that ate Dogecoin” has a market cap nudging US$17 billion, placing it ahead of Chainlink (LINK), Litecoin (LTC), Avalanche (AVE), and Uniswap (UNI).

Created by a pseudonymous developer under the alias of Ryoshi and launched just over a year ago, Shiba Inu has been described as “an experiment in decentralised spontaneous community building”. But why the sudden, seemingly spontaneous spike in value?

We can at least partially blame a tweet from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, proud owner of a new Shiba Inu pup called Floki:

Soon after Musk posted the above image of Foki last weekend, even the #SHIB hashtag started trending on Twitter. Meanwhile, data from Etherscan shows that the slavering pack of worldwide Shiba holders has now passed the 700,000 mark.

Shiba an Emblem of the Wider Crypto Market

Shiba Inu’s surge is emblematic of the wider crypto market, with bitcoin up 30 percent over the same period and Ethereum right behind it with a 25 percent spike.

One Shiba Inu whale (or whales) quietly transferred 6 trillion SHIB coins to a separate wallet address, with the overall price of the holdings worth US$80,856,857. The International Business Times reported the same whale(s) bought another 276 billion the next day, in instalments of 116 billion, 158 billion and a billion.

The whale(s) almost doubled their initial investment in just six days. Contrast this with the fact that on the first day of Shiba Inu futures markets, launched in May, traders lost over 1.34 trillion SHIB in just 24 hours.

Just days later, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated US$1 billion to an Indian Covid charity from the proceeds of dumping 660 billion SHIB, among other tokens.