Shiba Inu is rallying as crypto coins inch toward a comeback. Here’s why

Despite cryptocurrency’s cataclysmic past year, a herd of tokens have begun to claw their way back in 2023. Now leading the pack is Shiba Inu (SHIB), the dog meme-inspired coin, which has surged over 35% in the last few days, and almost 100% in the past month.

It’s part of a broader trend in the industry. Crypto poster child and top token Bitcoin has rallied 37% since January 1, and No. 2 token Ethereum is up 35%. What’s driving the shift isn’t immediately obvious. Among the most glaring green lights: optimism in the macroeconomic climate, stemming from signs that inflation may finally be waning.

But some may also believe in the prevailing Bitcoin analyses, which calculated that $21,000 was the so-called floor price for Bitcoin—and that if its price were to drop as low as a few thousand below the floor, what’s called “support” would kick in, when traders start buying the dip, thus propping up the price once again. Bitcoin has bounced back from a low of under $16,000 in November, to nearly $23,000 today, and tokens across the board have rebounded in tandem.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum blockchain is gearing up for a major technical boost, when the chain will undergo a “hard fork” during the Shanghai upgrade—which will let crypto traders who invested tokens into maintaining the chain’s ledger finally withdraw their stakes from the system. Scheduled for March, the Shanghai upgrade is already zooming through milestones, including the Zhejiang developer test that’s being conducted this month.

But now, hype is thumping for the debut of Shiba Inu’s own blockchain, Shibarium, which will build on Ethereum’s foundation. In the run-up, it’s introducing a new token called Bone Shibaswap (BONE), which will serve as a governance token that allows holders to vote on proposals as the Shibarium universe expands. Days ago, cryptocurrency exchange Bitget began listing BONE, which has already amassed a market capitalization of $411 million. Fans of SHIB, who are called the SHIB Army, are also campaigning for BONE to be listed on the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance. Binance has yet to respond.

BONE is the first of several milestones on Shibarium’s road map, which also includes the rollout of two more tokens, LEASH and TREAT, which are both rewards tokens for SHIB holders.

Fresh off the tail of the rally, SHIB is still worth a minuscule $0.000014. And it’s only inching toward closing the miles-wide chasm between where it is now, and where it was at its pandemic-era peak (roughly five times higher, in October 2021). But the cult coin, which was created as a joke to rival the popular Dogecoin, has a loyal following who together catapulted the coin from nothing, into the ranks of crypto charts’ top 10, in just one short year. And as a reminder of how wildly the crypto markets have lashed: If you had invested $100 in SHIB at its launch, in August 2020, that sum would have multiplied into an eye-watering $2,800,000 today—even despite the past year’s crashes.