The shiba inu coin, or SHIB, is an ERC-20 token that fuels the Shiba ecosystem. Comprising three separate tokens – SHIB, BONE and LEASH – that users can stake, swap or deposit into liquidity pools on the ShibaSwap decentralized exchange to earn interest and rewards.

Shiba inu is generally perceived as a meme currency similar to other dog-themed cryptocurrencies such as dogecoin and has a similarly viral following of more than 1.2 million people on Twitter. SHIB’s price often makes news headlines, as it routinely notches tremendous gains and endures equally steep losses.

SHIB had an initial total supply of 1 quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 tokens. In May 2021, however, the pseudonymous creator of SHIB known as “Ryoshi” sent half of the total supply to Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain who burned 90% of his tokens right away, meaning he permanently removed them from circulation. Buterin donated the remaining 10% to charity.

There is no burning or halving mechanism in place to reduce the supply of SHIB further.

SHIB has been one of the most volatile crypto assets in 2021. It started around May 11, when SHIB price rose 1,953% to $0.00003532 from $0.00000172, although it plummeted quickly to $0.00000793 in the next three weeks.

After months of sideways trading, SHIB rose sharply on Oct. 2, 2021, from $0.00000766 to $0.00002913 by Oct. 13. Two weeks later, SHIB recorded its current all-time high of $0.000089 on Oct. 28, although the market has since corrected again.

The market momentum affecting shiba inu can mainly be attributed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was also responsible for dogecoin’s massive price surge. Musk’s interest in dogecoin creates the market’s excitement for SHIB. Musk even got a Shiba Inu puppy, named Floki Frunkpuppy, triggering another market surge.

Most meme currencies offer no utility whatsoever. Shiba inu, however, has a community-driven rescue campaign for Shiba Inu dogs and an ecosystem of products and services, including a decentralized exchange named ShibaSwap. The peer-to-peer trading platform lets users trade SHIB to and from other cryptocurrencies. Users can also provide liquidity and stake the ecosystem’s three tokens (deposit them into a smart contract) to earn interest.

The BONE token is a governance token with a total supply of 250 million. BONE holders can propose and vote on changes to the Shiba protocol through the Doggy DAO, which stands for decentralized autonomous organization and refers to an organization managed by computer-based rules instead of a single controlling member. In addition, BONE is used to reward liquidity providers on ShibaSwap’s platform.

LEASH, or “Doge Killer”, was originally a rebase token pegged to dogecoin, where its supply was automatically adjusted by the protocol to keep its price in line with doge at a ratio of 1:1000. That is no longer the case today as the rebasing algorithm was removed, meaning LEASH now acts as a store of value coin in the Shiba ecosystem with a limited supply of just 107,647 coins.

The ShibaSwap decentralized exchange offers several functions, including:

The shiba inu coin was launched in August 2020 by the mysterious creator(s), known as Ryoshi. Shiba Inu has no backing from venture capital firms, only retail and institutional investors.

SHIB is an Ethereum-based token that has no native hard or soft forks unless crucial changes are made to the Ethereum protocol. There are no layer 2 upgrades planned at this time.