Meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) today jumped in price by 20%—a spike seemingly caused by Robinhood today adding support for the asset. At the moment, SHIB is currently trading for $0.00002674, according to CoinMarketCap data, having cooled slightly but still up 16% for the day.
Robinhood is a popular stock and cryptocurrency app that lets anyone (as long as they are an adult) get involved in trading. Today the app added support for SHIB, as well as Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), and Compound (COMP).
The company later announced on Twitter that it is giving away $100,000-worth of the new cryptocurrencies it listed.
Solana, Polygon, and Compound have all also spiked in price, but by less than 5%.
SHIB not only spiked the most, it is the best performing cryptocurrency in the past 24 hours. The token is the 15th biggest digital asset, with a market cap of $14.6 billion. It runs on the Ethereum network and seemingly sprung out of nowhere last year to become a significant player in the crypto world.
As a meme coin, though, it doesn’t have much utility: you can’t really spend SHIB anywhere and it’s not clear what it was created for, other than a joke, much like its predecessor Dogecoin. Meme coins are cryptocurrencies based on an internet joke or popular meme that celebrities or online communities pump.
The price of SHIB is a lot more volatile than other assets with big market caps, such as MATIC, which powers the Polygon network.
Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain that was designed to speed up transactions and ease the load on the main Ethereum network. It's native coin MATIC, which is used to pay for transactions on the Polygon network, is the 16th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap and was trading for $1.43 at the time of writing.
Compound, a decentralized finance (DeFi) project for taking out loans, is currently trading for roughly $129.25 with a market cap of $868 million. Solana, a layer-1 blockchain network that aims to compete with Ethereum, holds the position as the sixth biggest cryptocurrency and is trading for $106.71.
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