All about Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu (SHIBUSD) is an Ethereum-based altcoin (a cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin) that features the Shiba Inu—a Japanese breed of hunting dog—as its mascot.

Shiba Inu and Dogecoin are meme coins,1 which are cryptocurrencies that are associated with some theme—like the Shiba Inu dog in the case of Shiba Inu and Dogecoin—but are often launched as a parody or inside joke rather than as a digital product that actually has some utility. While Dogecoin was launched in December 2013, Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 by an anonymous individual or group called Ryoshi.

Shiba Inu's price soared more than tenfold in October 2021, giving it a market capitalization of $35 billion (as of October 31, 2021) and ranking it 10th among all cryptocurrencies by this measure.1 A tweet from Tesla founder Elon Musk on Oct. 4, 2021, featuring a picture of his new Shiba Inu puppy Floki provided the initial impetus for the meme coin's price surge. Because Musk is one of the most high-profile supporters of Dogecoin and the self-proclaimed "Dogefather," his cryptic tweets often result in heightened volatility in the cryptocurrency space.

The guiding tenets of the Shiba Inu ecosystem are spelled out in a "woof paper"3 (presumably a play on white paper), available at the ShibaToken.com website.

According to the paper, Shiba Inu was developed as the answer to a simple question: "What would happen if a cryptocurrency project was 100% run by its community?" Its founder Ryoshi attributes its origins to an "experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building." According to Ryoshi, the power of collective decentralization can build something stronger than a centralized team ever could create.

The SHIB Army's base of over 500,000 members embrace its founding principles, which are:

The project started from zero, with zero, in the spirit of creating something out of nothing;

It was not founded from an existing community or preassembled team; and

A professed love of Shiba Inu dogs.

Because Shiba Inu is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, it is created on and hosted by the Ethereum blockchain, instead of its own blockchain. Ryoshi states in the paper that he chose to build the Shiba Inu ecosystem on Ethereum because it was already secure and well-established, and it allowed the project to stay decentralized.

The Shiba Inu ecosystem consists of the following three tokens:

- Shiba Inu (SHIB): This is the project's foundational currency. Starting with a supply of 1 quadrillion (equal to 1,000 trillion), Ryoshi locked 50% in Uniswap (for liquidity purposes) and then sent the other 50% to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin for safekeeping. In May 2021, Buterin donated more than 50 trillion Shiba Inu coins, then worth over $1 billion, to a COVID-19 relief fund in India, when the nation was reeling from the Delta variant of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, Buterin also "burned"—or permanently removed from circulation—40% of Shiba Inu's total supply to a so-called dead wallet.

- Leash (LEASH): The second token in the Shiba Inu ecosystem, Leash represents the other end of the ecosystem's spectrum, with a total supply of only 107,646 tokens compared with the trillions of Shiba Inu tokens.

- Bone (BONE): Bone fits in between the other two tokens in terms of circulation supply, with a total supply of 250,000,000 tokens. It is designed to be a governance token that will allow the SHIB Army to vote on upcoming proposals.

The Shiba Inu Ecosystem also includes:

ShibaSwap: The goal of DeFi platform ShibaSwap is to provide a safe place to trade cryptocurrencies while remaining decentralized. SHIB and LEASH are best purchased and sold through ShibaSwap.

Shiba Inu Incubator: The incubator aims to shift the focus beyond popular art forms such as painting, photography, and digital rendering and discover ways to honor creativity and ingenuity.

Shiboshis: Shiboshis are 10,000 Shiba Inu-generated non-fungible tokens (NFTs) written on the Ethereum blockchain, with different traits that make each Shiboshi unique and collectible.