Meme-based cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) surged another 20% on Thursday (October 7) to become a top 20 cryptoasset (by market cap). In fact, at one point today, $SHIB occupied the #12 spot on the market cap table ahead of both Chainlink ($LINK) and Uniswap ($UNI).
This has been a great week for the Shiba Inu project, which was inspired by Dogecoin, i..e. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency.
According to data by TradingView, at 00:00 UTC on Monday (October 4), on crypto exchange FTX, $SHIB was trading around $0.00000852. And currently (i.e. as of 16:00 UTC on October 7), $SHIB is trading around $0.00002916, which means a gain of over 242% vs USD this week.
Furthermore, in the past one-month period, $SHIB is up over 278% vs USD.
So what has happened in the past few weeks to help $SHIB perform so well?
There are probably four reasons for $SHIB’s highly impressive performance :
- greater retail interest in crypto — especially altcoins — in general; this is partly due to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) going mainstream, with all kinds of organizations and celebrities talking about them;
- Coinbase listing $SHIB on Coinbase Consumer (i.e. Coinbase.com) and on Coinbase’s mobile app (for iOS and Android) on September 12;
- Supportive comments on Twitter by billionaires Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, especially the latter, about Dogecoin ($DOGE), which can be considered the original Shiba Inu inspired cryptocurrency; and most importantly
- Elon Musk’s comments about his Shiba Inu dog since June 25.
Here are some of Musk’s tweets about his dog; as you can see, the most recent one went out at the start of this week.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
