Even by cryptocurrency standards, the early returns on Shiba Inu (SHIB -1.44%) are hard to believe. Its price increased by over 40 million percent in 2021, meaning if you had bought merely $3 of Shiba Inu on Dec. 31, 2020, that small purchase would've ended up being worth $1.3 million at the end of that year.
Shiba Inu has lost quite a bit of value since that incredible run. It's down over 80% from its all-time high on Oct. 28, 2021, and it's down 41% on the year as of Aug. 21. To its credit, this meme coin has bounced back before. Let's look at what's currently going on with Shiba Inu, to see if it could be a millionaire maker again.
Image source: Getty Images.
From meme coin to crypto ecosystem
As you may have guessed from the name, Shiba Inu (which is the name of a breed of dog) didn't start out as a serious cryptocurrency. It was essentially a new version of Dogecoin, the original meme coin that used the "doge" meme (featuring a Shiba Inu dog) as its logo.
An anonymous founder, Ryoshi, created Shiba Inu as a crypto token on the Ethereum blockchain with a supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. Ryoshi then sent about half of those tokens to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in what was deemed a show of trust and vulnerability -- or as a publicity stunt. Buterin would eventually donate a portion of his SHIB tokens and burn (destroy) the rest.
Shiba Inu's initial success had nothing to do with fundamentals or any specific utility it had. It was simply one of many crypto tokens launched on Ethereum. Meme coins were popular at the time, and Shiba Inu managed to build a passionate following known as the SHIB Army.
But Shiba Inu's developers wanted it to be more than just a meme coin. Their goal was a full-fledged crypto ecosystem of decentralized applications and services. They started with a decentralized crypto exchange, ShibaSwap. In 2023, they launched Shibarium, a Layer-2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum. The SHIB Ecosystem now has a variety of applications and services, including ShibaSwap, blockchain games, a metaverse with digital real estate, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Shiba Inu's ecosystem may be all bark and no bite
A blockchain ecosystem can lead to a price increase in that blockchain's native cryptocurrency if people are using the ecosystem as they need the cryptocurrency to pay gas fees (transaction fees) on the blockchain. On-chain activity is also a metric that many investors check to evaluate cryptocurrency investments.
Despite Shiba Inu's popularity, there's not a lot of money on its blockchain or in its ShibaSwap exchange. The total value locked (TVL) into Shibarium is $1.7 million, according to DeFiLlama. ShibaSwap's TVL is $15.3 million (most of that value is locked into the Ethereum blockchain, not Shibarium). Those are very small numbers compared to Shiba Inu's market cap of nearly $8 billion.
Compare that with Ethereum, which has $90.7 billion in TVL and a market cap of $527 billion. Solana is another example, as it has $10.5 billion in TVL and a market cap of $100 billion. Those are legitimate blockchain platforms generating fee revenue from the money locked into their applications.
Don't expect to get rich with Shiba Inu
Shiba Inu's highest market cap on record was $36 billion in 2021, almost five times more than its current value. If Shiba Inu managed to get back to its all-time high, a $1,000 investment now would turn into about $4,800. That's nothing to complain about, but it's a long way from $1 million.
In all likelihood, Shiba Inu is past its millionaire-maker stage. It's one of the 25 largest cryptocurrencies, and at its current size, it's probably not going to deliver explosive growth. To achieve a 10,000% return (which would turn a $10,000 investment into $1 million), Shiba Inu would need to reach a value of $750 billion, significantly more than every cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin.
Even if you don't have such high expectations, Shiba Inu wouldn't be my first pick as a crypto investment. It hasn't demonstrated any competitive advantages or shown any signs it will be a long-term winner. Ultimately, this is a meme coin that's well past its glory days.
