# Who Let the Dogs Out? By [linux_fan](https://paragraph.com/@linux-fan) · 2023-05-04 --- If you thought [Dogecoin](https://mirror.xyz/0x0979109435E1c570E15A6c1bd939Cb2aBeB6eF28/1tbwSMQ20qhDdE6NsAVSsNcyIStijz3Ij0TY4g377dg) was a cute project, wait until you see its younger brother, Shiba Inu. Another meme coin joined the dog pile on August 1, 2020 from someone with a pseudonym of Ryoshi. You might say this was a meme of the Dogecoin meme. Before I go into the details of what makes Shiba Inu interesting, please take a moment to subscribe if you haven’t already so you will know when I publish a new post! [Subscribe](null) Heralded as the new Dogecoin killer, Shiba Inu entered during an economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic as an [ERC-20](https://mirror.xyz/0x0979109435E1c570E15A6c1bd939Cb2aBeB6eF28/_ZfeYRkSvn4m4aLjGL0yW2vIy4OIYWtAASTuVytafco) token with a ridiculously low price. On the day of its creation, 1 quadrillion (1,000 x 1 trillion) coins were minted and priced at $0.00000000051. For a more intuitive perspective, a modest $100 would have bought a bit over 196 billion SHIB that day. But half of the total supply was locked into a liquidity pool on Uniswap and the other half was sent to Vitalik Buterin, founder of [Ethereum](https://mirror.xyz/0x0979109435E1c570E15A6c1bd939Cb2aBeB6eF28/-6UiI17pXyh2M6nIi5BzBg-yTG96jn7TiKz155IWvRU). Not very much happened for awhile after this, with only about 13,000 wallets holding SHIB on March 13, 2021. But on March 14, 2021, Elon Musk tweeted: `I’m getting a Shiba Inu #resistanceisfutile` Within a month, the number of SHIB holders roughly doubled, and then on April 20, 2021, Jordan Belfort (the real life inspiration for the movie _The Wolf of Wall Street_) tweeted: `SHOW ME THE SHIBA INU` At this point the price of SHIB had risen to $0.000004058. That $100 of SHIB bought on August 1, 2020 would now be worth $795,686! Wallets holding SHIB roughly tripled to about 100,000, and by May 7 there were 150,000, then on May 8 there were 200,000. On May 10, major exchanges Binance, BitForex, and KuCoin all began to list SHIB as it had now gained their attention. The next day (May 11), SHIB was valued at $0.00003571, enough to give you $7 million from that initial $100 investment. On May 12, 2021, Vitalik Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB (about 5% of all the SHIB tokens in circulation) to the India Covid Relief fund. But before the charity could even start liquidating the tokens into cash, the price of SHIB dropped 44%. Then on May 16, Vitalik announced he had decided to burn over 400 trillion SHIB (about 40% of total supply). This point deserves a bit of additional explanation. To “burn” a cryptocurrency is to send some of it to a wallet which acts essentially as a black hole, one to which nobody will ever have access. The idea is that by reducing the total amount of coins in circulation a deflationary effect will raise the value of each individual coin. But several holders were pessimistic about how this would turn out and started selling off their SHIB. Over the next several months many exchanges picked up SHIB, which also launched its own exchange called ShibaSwap on July 6, 2021. More and more online merchants began accepting it as a payment method as well. On October 14, 2021, Shytoshi Kusama, SHIB project lead, tweeted about meeting with a game studio to make a Shiboshi video game. The same day a collection of SHIB themed NFTs were offered on ShibaSwap and sold out in just 35 minutes. On October 24, 2021, Elon Musk revealed in a reply to a Twitter post that he wasn’t holding any SHIB. This same day, SHIB was worth $0.0000423 each, enough for that initial $100 to now be over $8 million. Two days later on October 27, it was worth $0.00005672, getting that initial $100 to $11 million. The next day it continued its rise to $0.00008845, making the initial $100 now over $17 million. Then on November 5, 2021, the tune changed as a whale (one who owns huge amounts of a given asset) moved about $2 billion in SHIB to four different wallets, which spooked much of the community as such large moves are rarely made. Since then it has largely been on a downward trend, and at the time of this writing it sits at $0.00000984. Earlier I called this a dog pile because that’s mainly how these meme coins rise in value. As long as people keep buying more, the price keeps going up. But if people start selling more so than buying, the price falls. This speculation doesn’t sit well with many investment professionals, but it ironically represented some of the biggest gains in one of my investment portfolios. As with any investment, one must pay attention to trends and have an ear to the ground for what’s going on in the market as well as the individual cryptocurrency community. A lot can change very quickly, so it’s important to act when necessary. Speaking of action, a very simple but helpful one you can take for this blog right now is to subscribe. So far I’ve been able to publish one post each day and I’ll keep to this schedule as long as I have topics and the time to explain them. If you like reading about cryptocurrencies, this is a good place to be. [Subscribe](null) I have several plans for this blog which even expand beyond these posts, but I need funding to make it all happen. You can make a small contribution by linking a wallet to this platform (Mirror) and using the collect button to compensate me for my work. If you’d rather support me another way by setting the amount you’d like to contribute or in an alternative coin to ETH, I’d gladly accept donations of BAT, GRT, LINK, MATIC, SHIB, UNI, USDC, WBTC, AAVE, ENS, or WETH at the following wallet address. 0x0979109435E1c570E15A6c1bd939Cb2aBeB6eF28 ![QR code to scan with wallet app](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/79827da6759c04cd77de1eac8b4b76ec814b039f2331f70b41d4d9f854a5fde4.png) QR code to scan with wallet app --- *Originally published on [linux_fan](https://paragraph.com/@linux-fan/who-let-the-dogs-out)*