The Shiba Inu cryptocurrency is now the world’s 20th-biggest by market value and has more than tripled in the past week, partly fueled by Elon Musk’s latest tweet about his own puppy.
The SHIB token, centered around a breed of Japanese hunting dogs, is up another 69% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko pricing, putting its market value above $10 billion.
The gains have come amid a broad rally in major digital currencies, underpinned by favorable seasonal factors, positive technical chart signals and a lack of interference from the Federal Reserve. But SHIB’s 216% surge in the past week has well overshadowed the performance of Bitcoin and Ether, the two biggest tokens, which are both up more than 20% in this period.
A tweet by Tesla Inc.’s boss late Sunday night U.S. Time with a picture of a dog and the comment, “Floki Frunkpuppy”, may have also contributed to the frenzy. That followed a tweet in June that said, “My Shiba Inu will be named Floki” and one last month that read “Floki has arrived.”
Shiba Inu was founded by an anonymous person going by the name Ryoshi last year, and the coin’s website refers to it as “a decentralized meme token that evolved into a vibrant ecosystem.” It appears to have been made in the vein of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke in 2013—also with a Shiba Inu meme—but has since become a popular token that’s used for payments by some sports teams, AMC theaters and others.
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