Shiba Inu (SHIB), also called “the Dogecoin killer”, is the second most famous altcoin and meme coin behind Dogecoin.
Shiba Inu is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum and reported to be “100% run by its community.”
As Shiba Inu is built on Ethereum, it inherits Ethereum’s decentralization.
It is seen as an alternative to Dogecoin and supported by the SHIB Army, a fan base of over 500,000, pushing for support of Shiba Inu by promoting it on social media.
Shiba Inu’s mascot is fashioned after the Shiba Inu dog, a Japanese breed of hunting dog.
It was created anonymously in August 2020 by a person or group called Ryoshi.
Not much is known about the mystery founder, much like Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin.
Ryoshi has been quoted as saying that Shiba Inu was an experiment in decentralized community building, with the end goal of determining whether a decentralized organization could work without central leadership.
Shiba Inu started with a supply of 1 quadrillion SHIB, half of which was locked up in Uniswap, with the other half being donated to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin took SHIB worth $1 billion and donated it to a COVID-19 relief fund.
Most of Buterin’s remaining SHIB, valued at $6 billion and equal to almost half of SHIBs total circulating supply, was permanently burned from circulation, as Buterin wasn’t interested in holding the power brought on by having such a large share of total SHIB supply.
In 2021, Shiba Inu made global headlines when its price increased 1900% in one week.
SHIB and DOGE aren’t the only dog-themed cryptocurrencies in existence.
Baby Dogecoin (BabyDoge), Jindo INU (JIND), Alaska Inu (LAS), and Alaskan Malamute Token (LASM) are also trying to attract a SHIB-like following.
Due to SHIB’s success, many copycat cryptocurrencies have appeared, numbering over 100.
These copycats include Shiba Fantom, King Shiba, SpookyShiba, BitShiba, and many others.
SHIB is a top 15 cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a $7.2 billion mcap as of August 2022.
SHIB has a total supply of 589 trillion SHIB, with a circulating supply of 549 trillion SHIB.