Shiba Inu, the China-based meme coin that looks to follow in the paw prints of Dogecoin, spiked more than 34% Friday after it began trading on Coinbase.
The coin’s market cap jumped from $2.3 billion to nearly $3.5 billion in less than 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. That’s an impressive jump, but the individual coins have a long way to go before they’re at any notable level.
A single Shiba Inu coin was trading for $0.00000879 as of 10:22 a.m. ET. Put another way: You’d need to buy 1,138 of them for your investment to be worth more than a penny. (Of course, should Shiba Inu follow the path blazed by Dogecoin, that could make some investors a lot of money.)
Shiba Inu, trading under the ticker SHIB, is now the 47th largest crypto in the world. (Bitcoin, of course, is first, and Dogecoin comes in ninth.)
Elon Musk, who is (in part) responsible for the surge in Dogecoin prices earlier this year, has seemingly given his blessing to Shiba Inu: Earlier this week he tweeted a picture of his new Shiba Inu puppy named Floki. (Prices surged 40% on that tweet alone.)
Dogecoin saw a slight bump as Shiba Inu enthusiasm spread, rising a bit more than 2% in early trading Friday.
Experts say that the popularity of SHIB should not be ignored, since it reflects the behaviors of a new, growing class of cryptocurrency traders.
“Rather than simply dismissing the hype outright, it’s important to realize that what we’re seeing is the mass movement of traders new to crypto moving into the space,” Ben Caselin, head of research and strategy at cryptocurrency exchange AAX, told Coins2Day in May.
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