- The creators and moderators behind some of the recent developments behind SHIB took to a Twitter Spaces AMA on May 11, in an event hosted by the exchange Huobi.
- The popular meme cryptocurrency Shiba Inu recently burned 1.6 billion tokens, a move often used by cryptocurrency projects to optimize a token’s supply/demand dynamic.
Shiba Inu, the meme-inspired cryptocurrency that skyrocketed to fame earlier this year, has continued to captivate the attention of investors. With a current market capitalization of $5.16 billion and a fully diluted market cap of $5.17 billion, the token has maintained its position as the 15th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Its trading volume in the last 24 hours alone is $148.3 million, with a market dominance of 0.46%.
Huobi, the 11th largest cryptocurrency exchange, recently hosted an AMA for Shib Army moderators on May 11, asking some of the leaders behind the project what the community can expect in the days and weeks ahead.
According to Mazrael, the transition from a meme token to a vaulted and respected crypto project did not happen by accident, it was thanks to a large and dedicated team of developers who helped propel the project’s utility and entertainment value forward.
He mentioned specifically Shibarium Shiba Inu 2, which is currently in the testnet phase, and will eventually form the layer 2 blockchain for SHIB that, he said, will include “cutting-edge technology like A.I.”
“Also, we’ve got a successful mobile game that’s been developed by Shytoshi and with Playside Studios using Shiboshis,” providing an update on the NFT collection of 10,000 unique and playful Shiba Inus’ with different traits and abilities, telling listeners to the AMA that the mobile game is expected to be deployed to fans soon.
Furthermore, Mazrael added that the SHIB metaverse is still in production, though gave no exact date or timeline as to its eventual release but added that they had enlisted the services of one of the industry’s largest visualization studios, the Third Floor, which previously collaborated on Hollywood movies like Marvel and Star Wars.
When it came to assessing the macroeconomic conditions around meme coins like SHIB and alt-coins in general, Digarch says that questions around adoption for risk-on assets tend to do worse in environments that experience high inflation:
When you have high inflation, high-risk assets tend to get affected because what people do is sell off their high-risk assets and pay off their debts because with high inflation you get a high-interest rate high. So the cost of debt is expensive, so they sell off their high-risk assets and they pay off their debts. And unfortunately, cryptocurrency falls within the high-risk asset class.
On how these macroeconomic conditions may affect the adoption and price of SHIB, Digarch says a large part of it depends on liquidity in the Bitcoin market, mentioning specifically the upcoming Bitcoin halving, expected for April 2024.
“To sustain those rallies, you would require more liquidity. And as we head into the end of 2023, that liquidity pump will be determined by the pace of US crypto regulation,” Digarch says.
Yet Digarch remains optimistic about the potential of meme coins in general. “Memes are lovely, we know that in 2021, that bull run in all coins was actually driven largely by meme tokens.
Remember Dogecoin and a few others back then that helped drive new crypto adoption from non-crypto natives? So meme tokens, contributed a lot to the 2021 bull run. But will this repeat in the next cycle? Well, that’s quite tough to tell at the moment,” Digarch concluded.
