Shiba Inu Sets Record Number of Token Holders While Price Slid as Much as 13% Today

Shiba Inu now boasts more than 1.2 million token holders despite a 13% drop this morning.

The Shiba Inu (SHIB) story today shows a bit of market schizophrenia for this wildly popular, dog-themed cryptocurrency, because there's both good news and bad news for SHIB.

Good news: Shiba Inu hits record number of token holders

According to the real-time audit statistics on the Shiba Inu website, the coin that began as a joke in August 2020 and soared 49,000,000% last year now has 1,245,352 holders of its token right now. That's an all-time record for this doggy digital asset.

Additionally, Whalestats.com shows that SHIB is the second largest holding of Ethereum (ETH) whales -- individual investors that each hold at least a thousand ETH, currently valued at $2.64 million at the time of writing -- second only to the FTX token. The FTX token is the native digital currency of one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, FTX. The Whalestats figures show that 15.51% of the largest holders of Ethereum hold SHIB, while 16.48% hold more FTX.

These large investors obviously see some value in SHIB. It's no secret that Shiba Inu developers are working to move from its jocular beginnings into a serious cryptocurrency ecosystem. The Shiba Inu team has been expanding and building more value into its platform by launching a decentralized exchange, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), complementary coins for additional use cases, and a SHIB-based blockchain to move it off of the Ethereum network.

Despite all that positive activity, markets have been kicking this dog coin most of the morning.

Bad news: Shiba Inu was down as much as 13% today

At 12:19 a.m. ET today, SHIB hit its daily low of $0.00002348, which was a 13.1% decline from yesterday's top of $0.00002703, according to CoinMarketCap. The price has rebounded a bit since then and was down 7.7% at the time of writing. However, there's no apparent reason for this single-day double-digit drop other than SHIB's continuing slide of 19.19% over the past week.

While SHIB supporters should be happy to see more active holders of the token, as well as support from massive Ethereum investors, they must be scratching their heads about the recent price action. Perhaps even more worrisome is that its current price of $0.0000249 is down more than 71% from the token's record high of $ 0.00008845 in October 2021.

A 71% decline is a deep hole for any dog to try and dig its way out of.