Breaking: Shiba Inu Is Now Listed on Robinhood. Should You Buy?

Shiba Inu's price surged as high as 31% after the announcement was made on Robinhood's official Twitter channel today.

After months of lobbying, and 559,701 petition signatures, popular dog-themed cryptocurrency Shiba Inu (SHIB) has been listed on mobile trading app Robinhood along with three other top-100 cryptos. Robinhood broke the news on its official Twitter channel today.

The Shiba Inu token soared as high as 31% within the first hours of the news and has since settled back to a respectable 19.65% intraday pump at time of writing, according to CoinMarketCap. The other three newly listed cryptos on Robinhood were up single digits respectively following the news: Solana was up 4.64%; Polygon was up 5.18%; and Compound was up 7.56%.

Shiba holders had been pushing to get it listed on Robinhood

SHIB was created anonymously in August 2020 as an Ethereum-based alternative to Dogecoin. Last year, amid public support from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, SHIB became wildly popular and realized an incredible price pump of 49,000,000% in a few months. 

While the SHIB token had been available on major exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, Kucoin, and others, it was not available on Robinhood. To help hasten SHIB's listing on Robinhood, a petition launched last summer to persuade Robinhood to adopt the token. As of today, the Change.org digital petition was still live and had 559,701 signatories -- more than halfway to its target of 1 million. It's difficult to tell whether the lobbying activity or petition had any effect. 

The decision to list the four cryptos is more likely an effort by Robinhood to slow its recent stock slide. 

Robinhood has had a rough several months

Since its initial listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange last July, Robinhood (HOOD) soared to an all-time high of $70.94 on Aug. 4, 2021. Today it's trading at a steep 83% discount at $11.70 per share from August peak price. Interestingly, the same day Robinhood announced the launch of its digital wallet last week allowing holders to move digital assets off the trading app, an analyst at Goldman Sachs downgraded Robinhood from Neutral to Sell, cutting its price target for HOOD to $13 per share -- about 66% lower the company’s initial public offering price.

“Fading retail engagement, particularly among Robinhood’s lower end consumer customer base, could represent further headwinds . While the company has negotiated much better economics on crypto trading, we see the decline in broader industry crypto volumes largely offsetting this tailwind ,” according to the analyst note from Goldman.

According to Yahoo! Finance at press time, Robinhood stock was up 2.11% while the broader S&P 550 was only up 0.11%. So it appears that this news has helped slow HOOD's slide for now.

Is Shiba Inu a buy?

As of this writing, CoinMarketCap shows that SHIB is priced at $0.00002671, which is actually lower than its $0.00002745 price back on Mar. 31 when it announced the launch of its metaverse. Frankly, that's very surprising especially when you consider the extremely positive news cycle Shiba Inu has enjoyed over the past few weeks. 

The launch of its own metaverse; the resulting virtual land sale via its meta portal; news that the country of Turkey was exploring SHIB as a possible alternative currency; the pending launch of its own stablecoin named SHI; plans for a major gaming innovation for its virtual world; as well as the Robinhood listing were all big announcements that have occurred during the past 21 days. 

Yet none of these announcements were able to sustain their respective gains or build on each other's gains. That's not a good sign. 

An even worse sign is that Shiba Inu officially lost more than 70,000 token holders over the past month -- falling from a peak of 1,199,453 SHIB holders on Mar. 15, 2022 to 1,128,221 as of yesterday, according to CoinMarketCap.com. I would keep my eye on that important metric to wait and see if the SHIBA team can reverse attrition of its holders, because if Shiba Inu can't keep and grow its user base -- then all the news in the world won't matter.