Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a Memecoin project on Ethereum. The project was created in August 2020 by an anonymous developer (or a group of developers) with the pseudonym Ryoshi, aiming to compete with the first generation of memecoin, Dogecoin (DOGE), which earned it the nickname "Dogecoin Killer".
SHIB is the underlying ERC-20 token of the project. It is one of the cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization, ranking 16th among all the currencies included in TokenInsight.
The initial supply of SHIB is 100 trillion, the current circulation is 589.33 trillion, and the maximum supply is 999.98 trillion. The token was launched in the form of Fair Launch, that is, the team did not pre-mine or hold tokens. Ryoshi sent 50% to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, which is equivalent to locking half of the circulation; the other 50% was paired with 10ETH and placed in the corresponding trading pair’s fund pool on Uniswap.
It is worth mentioning that in May 2021, Buterin destroyed 90% of his SHIB holdings (about 40% of the total supply), which was worth about US$6.7 billion at the time. Buterin donated the remaining 10% to India's Covid-19 relief fund.
After years of development, the SHIB project seems to have been committed to getting rid of the label of Meme and has been continuously trying to innovate in various fields. It has developed from a meme coin with Shiba Inu as the theme and strong entertainment nature to a decentralized ecosystem with rich elements and a large community (i.e. "ShibArmy"). However, such a decentralized development direction has also brought a lot of doubts to SHIB: If it does everything, will it be unable to do anything well? Is it necessary for a meme coin project to go through so much trouble?
First, let’s take a look at what SHIB does outside of memecoin.
The complex ecosystem of Shiba Inu
Decentralized exchange Shibaswap and three tokens
Shibaswap is a DEX launched by the Shiba Inu project in July 2021, providing services similar to other DEXs, including buying and selling tokens, participating in liquidity staking, managing NFTs, etc. The platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain with the goal of providing a secure exchange for cryptocurrency traders while maintaining the decentralization of the market.
Shibaswap uses three tokens to drive the operation of the ecosystem. In addition to the core SHIB token of the entire "Shiba Inu Universe", there are two ERC-20 tokens: Bone ShibaSwap (BONE) and Doge Killer (LEASH).
BONE is the governance token of the Shibaswap ecosystem, with a total supply of 250,000,000. BONE is designed to allow ShibArmy to vote on proposals through a governance mechanism (Doggy DAO) and participate in platform governance. In addition, BONE is also the foundation of Layer 2 (Shibarium) in the SHIB ecosystem, which we will explain further later.
LEASH is an ERC-20 token with a total supply of just 107,646. It was originally set up as a rebase token pegged to the price of Dogecoin and is currently used to facilitate liquidity on the exchange. When users provide liquidity to the funding pools (“Puppy Pools”) on Shibaswap, they receive LEASH in return.
Rebase tokens can also become elastic supply tokens, which will dynamically adjust their circulation according to the price of the pegged asset. Its core purpose is to maintain a certain ratio between the user's holdings and the total supply, thereby stabilizing the actual value of the holdings.
Layer 2 Network Shibarium
Shiba Inu launched the Shibarium mainnet, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, on August 16, 2023. The Layer 2 solution aims to provide a more scalable and cost-effective trading platform for Ethereum, and will focus on the Metaverse and GameFi sectors.
Shibarium is built on a new consensus mechanism called Proof of Participation (PoP), where the network selects validators based on the proportion of the number of relevant cryptocurrencies held. Users need to lock 10,000 BONE in the Shibarium network to become a validator. 21 million BONE will also be used as a reward for validators and delegators within the Shibarium ecosystem and to pay gas fees.
NFT and NFT Games
In October 2021, the SHIB team launched 10,000 Shiboshi NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, and all NFTs were sold out within 34 minutes.
Shiboshis are the cornerstone of SHIB's subsequent development in the NFT field. Currently, Shiba Eternity, an NFT card game based on the concept of Shiboshi, has been launched on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, with over 100,000 downloads.
Original Universe Shib The Metaverse
Simply put, this is a metaverse project similar to Decentraland, and the main game content is "land buying and selling" and the creation of derivative digital assets and value.
The product has not yet been officially launched. According to the information released by the SHIB team on the blog in April this year, the Metaverse product will be officially launched at the end of 2023.
Development Status: Are SHIB’s efforts paying off?
It may not be so optimistic at the moment. Let’s take Shibaswap as an example.
Although it refers to the "vampire strategy" used by Sushiswap, hoping to attract Uniswap's LP by offering rewards, and now all the functions of Shibaswap have not been officially launched, the following conclusions are not comprehensive enough, but we still have to say that this DEX may not have attracted much market attention. According to TokenInsight data, Shibaswap's average daily spot trading volume is around $1.6M, which is really not impressive for an exchange endorsed by a Top20 cryptocurrency project.
Let’s take a look at Shibarium, which created a lot of hype before its launch.
On August 17, 2023, the SHIB team announced that Shibarium was officially launched. Unexpectedly, this time, the tokens of projects such as SHIB and BONE did not benefit from the good news, but instead experienced a wave of decline. The reason is that Shibarium exposed some technical problems shortly after its launch and stopped producing blocks.
According to screenshots of an internal Telegram conversation between Shibarium developers, lead developer Shytoshi said his team was unable to recover assets bridged to the Shibarium network.
Screenshot of the chat records within the team circulated online
Crypto sleuth ZachXBT said he had not confirmed whether the assets were actually lost, but noted that RPC (nodes that run key blockchain client software) was no longer operational and called the block browser Shibarium Scan "very bad."
Shibarium Scan is designed to be relatively simple. In addition, real-time data shows that since its launch, Shibarium has completed more than one million transactions and the total number of wallets has exceeded 1.1 million.
Although the developers later said that Shibarium did not have any cross-chain bridge problems and the funds stuck on the bridge were safe, and Shibarium was later put back online, it has to be said that the launch of this new product seems to have deepened the market's inherent impression that the SHIB team is "busy doing nothing."
As for the Metaverse product that is planned to be launched at the end of this year, we can choose to wait and see for now - after all, as far as it stands now, the relevant design has not yet reached a very perfect level, and there is no special difference or highlight compared to the leading projects in the track.
Summary of “Land Planning” in SHIB Metaverse
As a meme coin project, SHIB is indeed very different. Not only does it have a lifespan far exceeding the average of the meme coin track, it also strives to build more "real things" beyond the meme narrative.
We can still expect that with the team's continuous BUIDL and the support of the community, SHIB can create a complete, vibrant, and more interesting blockchain ecosystem; or perhaps, when the overall market rises in the future, it can bring a new wave of opportunities to SHIB. But now, after a series of mistakes made by Shibarium, perhaps Shib The Metaverse, which will be launched at the end of the year, is the next "life-threatening" node facing SHIB - it will reveal to us whether Shiba Inu is going to take off the hat of Meme or provide the market with another ridiculous Meme.
