Shiba Inu up 4.5%, despite crypto market slump and liquidations

Shiba Inu soared last week, even as the broader crypto market collapsed amid a wave of liquidations.

What is Shiba Inu?

Touted as a “Dogecoin Killer,” Shiba Inu or SHIB is a new token that appeared in 2020 that has the dog of the same name as its emblem. What is it about? On which platforms should I buy it? And how do you go about it?

Inspired by Dogecoin, and designed with the idea of competing with that currency, Shiba Inu is a cryptocurrency named after the eponymous dog. Its creator, who prefers to remain anonymous for now, chose the pseudonym Ryoshi, as well as the Ethereum blockchain to build this crypto. Unfortunately, little information is available about this new token.

According to the white paper or “Woofpaper” of Shiba Inu, the project is presented as a “decentralized and community building experiment”, which sets as a priority goal to go beyond the valuation of Dogecoin, and gives special importance to the rescue of shiba inu dogs, through the Shiba Inu Rescue association. The official website further invites artists from around the world to join the “Shiba art movement” in the non-fungible token (NFT) market.

Shiba Inu prices on the rise!

While the broader crypto market remains in the doldrums following this week’s liquidation, some cryptocurrencies are defying the downward trend. Among them is the Shiba Inu meme currency (SHIB), which is up about 4.5 percent on the day and more than 7 percent on the week, and is currently trading at $0.0000135, according to Coingecko.

The rise in SHIB’s price follows a spike in the token’s burn rate earlier this week. Holders burned just under 15,000,000 SHIBs on Aug. 17 and then over 180,000,000 on Aug. 18, according to the Shib Burn Tracker, a jump of over 1,100 percent. However, the surge appears to have been short-lived; according to another tracker, ShibBurn, the token burn rate has declined by more than 90% in the past 24 hours.

The SHIB token burn mechanism was introduced in April, with the goal of reducing the supply of tokens in circulation. SHIB holders who burn their tokens receive a yield-generating token, burntSHIB, which pays rewards in RYOSHI, another ERC-20 token.

Shiba Inu’s crypto rival Dogecoin, has fared less well amid the market meltdown; while it is up 0.9% on the day, it has lost about 3.7% over the past seven days.

Dogecoin had a brief spike after the release of Dogechain, a blockchain network that allows holders to create a wrapped version of the coin for use in DeFi applications.

However, the market had other ideas, with the two largest crypto-currencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, falling as traders liquidated their positions later in the week.