Meme coins like Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Dogecoin (DOGE) are in the market, with SHIB, in particular, standing out as the third best performer among the top 100 crypto assets by market capitalization last week.
At press time on Monday (09:25 UTC), SHIB was trading at $0.001569, up 0.4% over the past 24 hours and up 30% over the past week. Meanwhile, Dogecoin (DOGE) was at $0.076, down 4% on the day but up 10.5% on the week. From its all-time high in October last year, SHIB remains down nearly 82%, while DOGE is down nearly 90% from its May 2021 peak.
Remarkably, SHIB has now been up for four straight weeks – the longest winning streak since the big rally in September and October last year. It is also the first time since May 11th of this year that SHIB has traded above the $0.000015 level. At that time, SHIB fell to the same level as Bitcoin (BTC) and most other crypto assets collapsed in price.
At the same time, last week marked the fourth consecutive winning week for DOGE, the first week in a row since April of this year. And while the meme-coin rally is notoriously difficult to explain, one reason for the excitement around DOGE may be that Elon Musk’s The Boring Company is ready to accept DOGE as payment for users of its newly opened transit station in Las Vegas.
The Shibarium Public Beta test net is expected to launch later this year. Meanwhile, a dedicated metaverse and Shiba Inu non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem is planned for Q4 2022. A part of this is a game called Shiba Eternity, which according to screenshots posted on Twitter, seems to be an online card-based battle game similar to popular play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity (AXS).
Additionally, SHIB lead developer Shytoshi Kusama has previously said that a decentralized stablecoin known as SHI is planned as part of the growing ecosystem. According to Hayden Hughes, CEO of social-trading platform Alpha Impact, the gains in meme coins show that ordinary retail investors are again drawn to the crypto market.
The joy and festive spirit could be felt from the Twitter account related to the Shiba Inu community over the weekend, with users celebrating that SHIB had – according to some sources – surpassed DOGE in market cap.