The SHIB-storm might be over.
On Tuesday, the price of the Shiba Inu crypto currency coin, which trades as SHIB, shot up 12%, putting SHIB’s weekly gains at 52%. Before the recent rise, SHIB’s price had fallen 75% from its all-time high of $0.00008616 per coin reached in October.
But SHIB is now trading at $0.00003277 per coin, making the meme coin the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world with a market valuation of $17.9 billion.
SHIB’s rebound mirrors a broader recovery in crypto markets in the past week. Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are also up 13% and 17%, respectively.
“Bitcoin and Ethereum both bouncing off the lows have again given investors confidence in other coins such as Shiba Inu, which have also bounced off weeks of downtrend,” Ishan Arora, a partner at crypto hedge fund Tykhe Block Ventures, told The Economic Times.
But SHIB holders point to some new projects within the coin’s community as reasons why the coin is gaining momentum.
On Feb. 5, Unification, a Singapore-based blockchain solutions provider that has worked with companies like Amazon and Google, announced that it has been working with the Shiba Inu community to develop Shibarium.
Shibarium is a layer 2 blockchain, which means it is built on top of Ethereum’s blockchain but will exclusively support trading and other transactions in the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Shibarium will enable “rapid low cost transactions optimized for gaming,” Unification wrote in a blog post on Feb. 5. Unification says it plans to begin public tests for the network “very soon,” which may have prompted investors to buy in, Gritt Trakulhoon, an investment analyst at Titan Global Capital Management USA Inc., tells Bloomberg.
On Feb. 3, Shytoshi Kusama, the coin’s top influencer, announced that Shiba Inu coin is officially partnering with Welly’s, a burger restaurant with one physical outlet in Naples, Italy, that describes itself as “the first and only SHIB themed restaurant powered by the community.” As part of the deal, Welly’s says SHIB will handle payments for Welly’s, integrate NFTs and Shiba Inu’s blockchain into Welly’s business, and guide Welly’s business strategy.
But some critics are not convinced that Shiba Inu’s surge will continue, and that the meme-coin remains a risky bet with little underlying value.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
