Why Was Shiba Inu Up 23% Today? Should You Buy?

Shiba Inu has added new wallet holders every day since April 11, reversing its prior four-week slide.

Over the past four days, more than $400 billion has been wiped out on custodial and noncustodial wallets across cryptocurrency exchanges as macroeconomic concerns such as inflation fears, rising interest rates, and tighter lending from banks have dragged down cryptos and the broader financial markets. As of this writing, the total crypto market was down 2.28% to $1.44 trillion and the leading digital asset Bitcoin was down 3.62% according to CoinMarketCap.

However, one surprising bright spot on the charts was dog-themed crypto token Shiba Inu (SHIB), which was up as much as 22.9%, hitting $0.00001785 at 9:09 a.m EST. this morning, from its 24-hour low of $0.00001375 at 8:34 p.m. EST last night.

Shiba Inu adds more than 18,000 new users since mid April

While the market fundamentals and technical underpinnings for Shiba Inu have not changed, positive sentiment seems to be trending for the project. Back in March, Shiba Inu saw an average of 2,400 wallet holders abandon the token every day, so much so that by April 11, 2022, nearly 70,000 users had divested all their Shiba Inu holdings.

That trend has reversed.

Every day since April 11, hundreds of unique wallet accounts have registered deposits of Shiba Inu, for a total of 18,627 new users according to CoinMarketCap data regarding the number of token owners on the monthly view. While Shiba Inu has yet to regain the full complement of its past user base, the project's managers and developers continue to gain consistent traction.

Shiba Inu creator promises more positive developments soon

So far this year, Shiba Inu has announced more significant milestones than the vast majority of other individual crypto tokens or coins, when you consider the following events all occurred in less than six weeks:

• The country of Turkey was exploring SHIB as a possible alt-currency to fight inflation.
• The announced launch of Shiba Inu's own metaverse.
• The resulting virtual land sale via its meta portal.
• The announced upcoming launch of its own stablecoin named SHI.
• Plans for a major gaming innovation for its virtual world.
• Popular fintech trading app Robinhood announced that it's listing SHIB on its platform.
• The launch of a SHIB "burn portal," which has permanently removed 11 billion tokens from the circulating supply to try and boost the price.

This past Friday, the pseudonymous creator of Shib Inu -- who tweets under the moniker of Shytoshi Kusama -- stated to the 800,000 Twitter followers of that account, that even more is in the works for the Shiba Inu ecosystem. The tweet reads: "Watching the sunset, but the future of $Shib has never been so bright. Have a grand weekend #shibarmy; lots on deck in the upcoming weeks and months to be very excited about. VERY."

Is SHIB a buy?

Despite today's price pop and the creator's promises for the future, SHIB is still down more than 80% from its peak price of $ 0.00008845 in October 2021. There could be more upside in the short term, but daily double-digit pumps for this project are highly unlikely given the current market conditions and tokenomics for SHIB.

While the project eliminated 11 billion SHIB tokens from circulation since last month, that's kibbles and bits compared to the more than 589 trillion tokens still available, which will likely continue to suppress the price per token indefinitely.