In brief
- A Dogecoin knockoff, Shiba Inu, is the latest meme coin to grab investors’ attention.
- Today, Binance announced it will allow trading of the ERC20 token because of high demand.
- But the exchange’s CEO warned of the token’s volatility.
Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, today announced it will list Shiba Inu (SHIB), a new meme coin and Dogecoin knockoff that exploded in value this week.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao made the announcement on Twitter today—adding that the demand for the new currency was so high that the exchange ran out of deposit addresses.
Zhao, however, made it clear that Binance listing the token should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the coin's potential value: “Super high risk. NFA [not financial advice],” he wrote on Twitter.
SHIB is an Ethereum-based (ERC20) token. This means it runs on the Ethereum network. It is also a meme coin: a crypto token whose worth depends on how funny the Internet finds the joke it represents.
And this meme coin is based on the Shiba Inu internet meme—the same meme that the hugely popular Dogecoin is based on.
Today SHIB was trading at $0.00002648, according to CoinMarketCap data. Its price is up 79% in the past 24 hours. In the past seven days, its price has rocketed up 1,210%.
Demand for the coin was so high today that Binance couldn’t cope with the demand. “There is a large number of users demanding it, to the point where we ran out of ETH deposit addresses due to SHIB today,” Zhao wrote. “Never happened before for any other ERC20 coin.”
In a strange twist, the anonymous developers behind the coin, which launched last August, have over the past year sent 50% of the token supply to the wallet address belonging to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
This means Buterin unwittingly now holds billions of dollars-worth of the crypto. Buterin, though, doesn’t have anything to do with the project. Its developers said in SHIB’s whitepaper that they did this to essentially lock the coins out of circulation, which helps to further drive up the price.
Meme coins are popular because crypto investors can (sometimes) make easy money from them. An internet community hypes up a coin online, and people buy lots of it—in turn pushing up the value.
Quite often, people then cash out large returns, and more often than not, the meme coin is soon forgotten about. Dogecoin, however, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity within the last year thanks in large part to celebrity endorsements from the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Cuban.
SHIB doesn’t have such endorsements. Yet.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
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