A complete overview of Shiba Inu (SHIB) price history and meme-filled timeline, from Elon Musk tweeting about the memecoin to the Dogecoin "flippening" — where SHIB briefly overtook the OG.
Whether you’re a steadfast believer in memecoins like Doge and Shiba, or if you think they’re destined to end miserably, you can’t deny that Shiba’s had a hell of a run.
What other asset in the history of free market capitalism has given its earliest investors a seventeen million percent return in just fifteen months? The power of memes.
Like every other memecoin, Shiba Inu didn’t didn’t being with a flying start. In fact, basically nothing happened from its creation in August 2020 until Elon Musk (who else) tweeted in March 2021 about getting a Shiba Inu puppy.
Since the now infamous tweet, SHIB HODLers have been on quite the rollercoaster.
In the unlikely event you’ve managed to avoid reading about Shiba’s parabolic run, here’s a quick overview of the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
If you’re up to scratch on the “doge killer” meme token and you’re looking for the history of Shiba Inu, it’s further down.
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What Is Shiba Inu?
Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a memecoin developed in August 2020 by a pseudonymous person or group called Ryoshi.
Like Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator, Ryoshi’s true identity isn’t widely known. In a blog post in May, Ryoshi described himself as “a nobody” and “not important."
The SHIB token is an ERC-20 token hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. There were initially a quadrillion (a thousand trillion) tokens, but today’s circulating supply is just over half that number, at 549,095,509,738,353 SHIB.
Shiba Inu takes its name from one of Japan’s six native dog breeds. Shibas are regarded as intelligent dogs with fiery personalities and cat-like agility. In the past, they were used for hunting birds, game and wild boar. The Shiba Inu pictured below belongs to Elon Musk.
What Does Shiba Inu Hope to Achieve?
The Shiba Inu whitepaper, also called the “woofpaper,” explains that Shiba is “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building.”
The Woofpaper employs a uniquely philosophical narrative of what Shiba is and what it aims to do. The short version is that Shiba wants to challenge the “bureaucracy of our centralized society” by creating fully decentralized communities.
The slightly longer version is: “with Shiba, we have from the beginning made very clear that no-one is in charge. There is no man accountable, no person responsible and no entity has the keys to the kingdom."
The author elaborates that the Shiba ecosystem is “our way of recognizing the importance of tearing down a long-established paradigm of a formulaic success and building a path to freedom and creativity in its place.”
Since the woofpaper’s release, the Shiba Inu ecosystem has rapidly expanded to include two other tokens — the LEASH token and the BONE token.
The LEASH token, also known as the Doge killer, was initially designed as a rebase token pegged to SHIB’s main competitor — Doge. However, after a change of direction, it was decided that LEASH would become a value store crypto with a low supply of just 107,647 tokens.
The BONE token is the governance token for Shiba Inu’s DEX, ShibaSwap. BONE holders can vote on changes to ShibaSwap, and there are 250 million tokens in circulation.
What Is ShibaSwap?
ShibaSwap is a decentralized exchange, or DEX.
The ShibaSwap platform offers six key features:
DIG
By depositing crypto in a pool, you can earn BONE tokens. The amount of BONE tokens you can earn is proportional to the amount of liquidity you provide to the pool.
BURY
You can stake all three tokens — SHIB, LEASH and BONE — to earn interest which is paid to you in BONE tokens. The rates of interest at the time of writing are pictured below.
SWAP
Here, you can swap one token for another. There are hundreds of tokens available, including MATIC, ETH, AAVE and LINK.
WOOF
This feature lets you cash out your liquidity pool and staking rewards.
BONEFOLIO
This area is for you to track your current holdings and interest returns on any tokens you have staked. Or, in Shiba speak, check your “dogalytics.”
NFTs
This area is for buying NFTs unique to the Shiba Inu ecosystem, called Shiboshis. Shiboshis went on sale on Oct. 14, 2021. Below are four of the Shiboshis going on sale soon.
You will eventually be able to use Shiboshis in an upcoming game called “The Shiboshi Game.” Exactly what the game is and when it will be released isn’t yet known, but some details were teased already through this blog post.
What we know so far is that each NFT will possess unique abilities. For example, if your Shiboshi has laser eyes, that might allow you attack other players from further away than you otherwise could have.
Finally, There’s the Shiba Incubator.
The Shiba Incubator is a creative environment for artists to develop work with help from other Shiba community members. Creative work developed in the incubator is later displayed and sold through ShibaSwap.
Below is an example of artwork created in the Shiba Incubator.
A Brief Price History and Timeline of Shiba Inu
Aug. 1, 2020: Shiba Inu is born. 1 quadrillion (a thousand trillion) tokens are minted.
On this day, a single SHIB cost $0.00000000051. $100 would have bought you 196,078,431,372 SHIB.
Throughout this timeline, we show how much this hypothetical $100 investment would have been worth in USD at different points in time.
Shortly after the initial tokens were minted, 50% of the total SHIB supply was locked into a SHIB/ ETH liquidity pool on Uniswap.
The other 50% was sent to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder, in three transactions.
Ryoshi explains the reason for sending 50% of the total SHIB supply to Buterin in the whitepaper. “There is no greatness without a vulnerable point and as long as VB doesn’t rug us, then SHIBA will grow and survive.”
From this point on until eight months later in March 2021, very little happens in the Shiba ecosystem.
The average daily trading volume for SHIB in these eight month fluctuates between zero and a few thousand dollars until the end of January 2021, when there’s a spike up to around $26 million.
SHIB in 2021
March 13: SHIB’s market cap reaches $1.28 million. At this point, there are just 13,000 SHIB holders.
March 14: Elon Musk tweets “I’m getting a Shiba Inu #resistanceisfutile.” And so begins a Shiba Inu’s parabolic run.
April 11: The number of SHIB holders doubles to 23,000.
April 20: Jordan Belfort, aka the Wolf of Wall Street, tweets “SHOW ME THE SHIBA INU.”
SHIB’s market cap is at $535 million.
On this day, a single SHIB costs $0.000004058. The $100 of SHIB bought on Aug. 1, 2020, would already be worth $795,686.
According to The Life You Can Save calculator, eight hundred grand could pay for 400,000 bed nets to protect people living in Malaria-stricken areas. Alternatively, you could also fund more than three million antibiotic rounds to prevent blindness from trachoma.
800 grand also happens to be enough cash to buy tickets to the edge of space for you and two friends via Virgin Galactic with cash left over for a few beers when you land. Splendid.
April 22: There are now 100,000 SHIB holders, which is a threefold increase in just two days.
The SHIB army is understandably elated.
The paper details how the Shiba ecosystem could grow, why Ryoshi chose to rely on Ethereum rather than other blockchain networks and explains SHIB’s tokenomics.
May 7: The number of wallets holding the SHIB token has at this point increased to 150K.
May 8: Another 50K wallets pick up some SHIB, bringing the total to 200K holders.
On the same day, SHIB’s market cap crosses $10 billion. Were SHIBA an American company and not a cryptocurrency, it would feature in the S&P 500.
May 10: Binance lists Shiba Inu in the innovation zone, with two trading pairs: SHIB/BUSD and SHIB/USDT. Two other prominent exchanges — BitForex and KuCoin — list the SHIB token. This is big news for the plucky little memecoin that hopes to one day overtake Doge.
May 11: A single SHIB costs $0.00003571. The $100 in SHIB bought on Aug. 1, 2020, would now be worth $7,001,960. This is an eightfold increase in less than a month.
This is easily enough cash to buy a brand new Bugatti Divo — a sports car reminiscent of an Italian-made Batmobile with a ludicrous top speed of 380km/h. You could traverse the width of America in just twelve hours by driving at top speed in a straight line without stopping in this monster.
However, while the Bugatti does get you to the office faster than the bus, finding somewhere to park it safely might prove tricky…
May 12: The world starts paying attention to the “Doge killers.” An article is published on the Fortune magazine website titled “What is the Shiba Inu coin? Experts weigh in on the ‘Dogecoin killer’ hype.”
On the same day, Vitalik Buterin puts his SHIB to good use by donating 50 trillion SHIB to the India Covid relief Fund. This was about 5% of the total SHIB tokens in circulation.
Forbes described VB’s gift as a $1 billion donation, but others contest this, as selling that much SHIB in one go would have certainly crashed the price. Before the Indian Covid Relief Fund could sell a single token, the price had crashed 44%.
In response to the donation, Sandeep Nailwal, who co-founded Polygon and is currently running the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, tweeted “We will act responsibly!” The full tweet is pictured below.
May 13: The Shiba Inu Twitter account responds to SHIB’s wild price swings following VB’s donation to India’s covid relief fund.
The author argued that VB’s donation was not a rug-pull, and in fact lends legitimacy to the platform by showing that SHIB can solve real-world problems.
They write “[VB’s] action lifted our project to new heights and gives us the incredible gift of knowing our hard work will contribute to saving millions of lives.”
May 14: StealthEX adds the SHIB token to its exchange.
May 16th – VB decides to burn more than 400 trillion SHIB, which was about 40% of the total supply.
VB’s decision is still being received with mixed feelings.
Many SHIB holders believe the permanent removal of 40% of the total supply would (eventually) give more investors the confidence to buy SHIB tokens, which would then drive up the price.
Others argued that this decision spelled the end of Shiba Inu.
May 17: The Shiba Inu Twitter account responds to many SHIB holders dumping their holdings in response to VB’s decision to burn 40% of the supply. The full message is pictured below.
May 27: Burency adds the SHIB token to its exchange.
May 31: Indodax adds the SHIB token to its exchange.
June 10: Changelly PRO adds the SHIB token to its exchange.
July 6: ShibaSwap goes live!
Within 24 hours of the launch, more than $1 billion in value was locked on the platform.
June 17: Voyager lists the SHIB token on its exchange.
July 4: CoinMarketCap reports that SHIB and Doge Killer have both broken into the top five trending tokens in the USA.
July 5: Shopping.io announces a new partnership with SHIB. SHIB holders will be able to buy from Amazon, eBay and Walmart using SHIB.
This is big news for SHIB. As more holders buy and sell products with SHIB, the demand for it, and therefore its price, are likely to increase.
July 20: SHIB’s market cap dives to $2.3 billion, down from nearly $20 billion in May, where it stays until October.
August 21: Bitvavo lists SHIB on its exchange.
September 16: Coinbase lists SHIB, greatly expanding the pool of investors who can buy SHIB.
October 6: The official SHIB Twitter account — @Shibtoken — reaches one million followers.
October 7: NowPayments partners with SHIB, allowing for SHIB holders to make e-commerce purchases using SHIB.
On this date, SHIB’s market cap reached just shy of $20 billion.
October 14: Shytoshi Kusama, the SHIB project lead, tweets about meeting a game studio to discuss the development of the Shiboshi Game. He later tweeted again saying, “gantastic meeting.”
October 14: Shiboshi NFTs release, an expansion of the Shiba ecosystem. The first NFT sale sold out in 35 minutes.
All of the NFTs were available through ShibaSwap, and you could only buy them using LEASH. Every NFTs has a mechanism allowing you to burn $100 of SHIB in exchange for permanently naming your NFT.
Click here to see the full Shiboshi gallery.
October 24: Elon Musk reveals in a tweet that he doesn’t own any SHIB, prompting an outcry from the SHIB army.
On this day, a single SHIB costs $0.0000423. $100 in SHIB bought on August 1, 2020, would now be worth $8,294,118.
Eight million dollars is by many estimates enough money to plant between five and ten million trees, which would certainly make a dent in your carbon footprint.
Alternatively, you could also buy your own island in the Bahamas like the one pictured below.
October 27: In just two days, a single SHIB rises to $0.00005672.
$100 in SHIB bought on August 1, 2020, would now be worth an $11,121,568.
You can do a lot of good for the world with eleven million dollars. For example, you could cover the cost of 55,000 hospital visits in low-income areas of India and East Africa through the Equalize Health charity.
Incidentally, eleven million dollars would also buy you a house so embarrassingly massive that it appears in magazine articles about what people with far too much money spend their money on.
It could even look like the house pictured below, which actually did appear in an article by CBS news about houses worth more than 10 million dollars.
October 28: The cost of one SHIB token reaches its ATH of $0.00008845. $100 in SHIB bought on August 1, 2020, would now be worth an eye-watering $17,343,137.
There are many too many charitable causes that $17 million could be well spent on to list them anywhere.
According to The Life You Can Save, you could prevent 39 million children suffering from a devastating parasitic disease called Schistosomiasis. You could also restore the eyesight of 340,000 people with curable blindness through the Seva Foundation.
Alternatively, you could buy a 131ft, 6 bedroom Sunseeker Super Yacht complete with Jacuzzi and an on-board gym like the one pictured below.
October 29: Fortune reports that Shiba and Doge combined market cap is greater than the combined market caps of smallest 388 companies on the S&P 500 index.
November 1: Shiba briefly overtakes Dogecoin as the #1 memecoin, featuring in the top 10 cryptos when measured by market cap.
At it's all-time high, Shiba Inu price reached a market cap of around $51.4 billion, or 19607X to reach BTC's market cap. Shib price reached $0.00008845 at ATH.
Keep in mind that Dogecoin had a 7-year head start on Shiba.
November 5: A SHIB whale moves $2 billion in SHIB to four different wallets. HODLers get spooked, and the price drips down to $0.0000651.
November 10: Although 523,000 people signed a petition to list SHIB on Robinhood, the online brokerage has announced that they will not do so, citing a "safety-first" approach in listing digital assets.
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