Meme Coins Dogecoin, SHIB Continue Week-Long Slump

Canine cryptocurrencies are still in the doghouse, with the leaders of the meme coin pack, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), continuing to tumble. 

Dogecoin, the 13th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is down over 6% in the past week, according to data pulled from CoinMarketCap. It’s currently trading just over $0.11 a token, down almost 85% from its all-time high of $0.73 set last May. 

Pitched as a joke back in 2017, DOGE has become the face of memetic money. There have been very few fundamental updates to the original protocol and Dogecoin doesn’t offer any kind of staking, yield farming, or decentralized finance (DeFi) features. 

Though there have been talks among the developers behind the project to continue to improve the cryptocurrency’s transaction speed, these discussions have yet to take hold.

SHIB struggles

Across the crypto kennel, Shiba Inu isn’t faring much better. SHIB is currently trading at $0.0000214 and has plummeted 8% over the past week. Despite its penny coin status, SHIB remains the industry’s 15th-largest cryptocurrency, overtaking heavyweights like the DAI stablecoin, Cosmos, and the Ethereum scaler Polygon.

This fall has been particularly painful for Shiba Inu fans, because as early as October last year SHIB was crypto’s ninth-largest asset by market cap. 

Despite the bearish run, both assets have made headlines here and there throughout the week. 

AMC Theaters, for instance, rolled out online payment options for both SHIB and DOGE on March 10. The feature was made possible through BitPay, according to AMC CEO Adam Aron.  

SHIB’s burn rate, a crypto term that refers to the destruction of a portion of a token’s supply, has also accelerated recently. Burn tracker Shibburn reports a total of more than 410 trillion SHIB tokens in total, with more than 400 million SHIB burned yesterday in a single transaction. Burning tokens is often seen as a bullish trigger for projects, as removing tokens from circulation can be seen as rendering the token more scarce. 

Still, just as the project is burning tokens, a large amount of SHIB tokens are also minted each day. 

Perhaps the most telling sign of the dog coin slump was the minor impact Elon Musk had on Dogecoin's price. 

In the past, tweets from the Tesla and SpaceX CEO mentioning DOGE led to a massive run-up in the cryptocurrency’s price.

When he said yesterday that he wouldn’t sell his Dogecoin amid rising inflation concerns, however, the token budged a mere 2% before continuing its downward slide.