The price trend of the crypto Shiba Inu fails to rise significantly, despite the good news.
In fact, while Bitcoin is at +60% since the beginning of the year, and Ethereum at +51%, since late 2022 SHIB has gained only a paltry 6%.
It is still doing better than Dogecoin (+1%), but among the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization only DOGE and LEO are doing worse, excluding stablecoins of course.
Summary
The price trend of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) crypto
SHIB is the coin of the Shiba Inu project
Right now it ranks 15th overall in the ranking of major cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, surpassed even by BUSD, which is slowly disappearing from the market.Â
Since reaching an all-time high in late October 2021, it has practically lost 90% of its value in less than seven months, and has done nothing but lateralize for almost a year since then.
In fact, on 19 June last year it touched 7.7 millionths of a dollar, and since then the cumulative gain has been only 11%.
Indeed, the current value of $8.6 millionths is lower than it was on 22 June 2022, three days after it touched the low of this bear-market.
In spite of this, the current price is still enormously higher than what SHIB had before the start of the last big bull run, and it is also much higher than what it had in April 2021.
The lateralization phase
For being such a volatile crypto, it is really anomalous that its price has been lateralizing for so long.
After touching 7.7 millionths in June 2022, it only spiked very briefly to 17 millionths a couple of months later, but then returned to 8 millionths at the end of the year. The current value of 8.6 millionths is only slightly higher than the value at the end of 2022.
Excluding two brief spikes above 13 millionths, and the single one below 8, it has practically been eleven months since SHIB’s price has fluctuated within a fairly compressed range of 8 to 13 millionths.
Such a situation is anomalous, to say the least, for a high-volatility cryptocurrency like Shiba Inu, but it is actually quite easily explained.
In fact, SHIB’s price trend is precisely marked by long periods when little or nothing significant happens, alternating with brief moments when huge speculative bubbles inflate and then inevitably burst.
SHIB debuted in the crypto markets in August 2020, and until April 2021 nothing significant happened.
Since then, three huge speculative bubbles have inflated, all three bursting within a very few weeks.
Except for the few weeks when these three bubbles inflated and then burst, the rest of the time is marked by long periods of lateralization. And this has been the case for almost three years now.
The good news
Curiously, this dynamic turns out to be impervious even to good news.
In fact, recently 11 million transactions were surpassed on the Puppynet beta of Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s Layer 2.Â
The important thing is that Puppynet was launched only a little over two months ago, so 11 million transactions in a little over two months is a decidedly significant number.
Although this news has been making the rounds in the crypto world in recent days, SHIB’s price reaction has been tentative to say the least.
The day before yesterday it went from 8.5 to 8.9 millionths of a dollar in just a few hours, only to return to 8.6 millionths tonight.
However, it is worth pointing out that Puppynet is still only a beta version, so it is possible that many of the transactions on Shibarium are still testing.
Another important figure is that the number of Shibarium wallet addresses is approaching 16 million, although it does mean that there are still many without any transactions.
Also in the works is the so-called Ethereum Shibarium Bridge, which should facilitate interactions between the ERC-20 SHIB token and its version on Shibarium.Â
Is the crypto Shiba Inu in crisis?
In light of all this, there are those who are beginning to speculate that the Shiba Inu project may be in a moment of crisis.
Technically and technologically it is progressing, even significantly, but apparently not from the point of view of adoption.
In fact, market demand for SHIB is not increasing, despite the innovations being released at the technical level.
In reality, it should come as little surprise that a memecoin that attracts interest primarily because of its speculative nature fails to do so with innovations or new technical features.
The value of SHIB is driven by the community, and as long as the community sees it primarily as an opportunity for speculation, it is safe to imagine that only eventual hype will drive its price back up.
