- Meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) has plummeted over 73% from its all-time high in October 2021.
- SHIB belongs to a controversial class of crypto assets called “memecoins” (also called sh*tcoins) that swing massively in price in response to related news, hype and the tweets of Elon Musk.
- Due to the purely speculation-based movements of SHIB’s value, analysts and experts are bearish on SHIB’s long-term price prediction.
As of Tuesday March 8th, SHIB is trading for $0.00002226 USD ($0.00002999 AUD). SHIB is down 73.2% from its all-time high of $0.00008616 USD ($0.00011478 AUD) on October 28 of 2021. With a market cap of $12.1 billion USD ($16.3 billion AUD) SHIB is ranked as the 15th largest cryptocurrency at the time of writing.
SHIB and similar meme coins like DOGE & FLOKI have proven to be major head-scratchers for traditional investors. It’s easy to poke fun at meme coins for being more like gambling than investing, but after SHIB’s meteoric rise, thousands of meme coin investors were laughing their way to the bank.
In what’s being called “the greatest trade of all time”, one SHIB investor managed to turn $8000 USD ($11171 AUD) into $5.7 billion ($7.9 billion AUD) after purchasing 70 trillion tokens (13% of the total supply) when SHIB launched on August 1, 2020.
So, what is SHIB? And how did a cryptocurrency valued purely on speculation come to be worth nearly $13 billion?
In this story…
What is Shiba Inu (SHIB)?
SHIB was launched by an anonymous founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ryoshi in August 2020. SHIB initially gained in popularity after the first crypto meme: Dogecoin (DOGE) went viral in January of this year. DOGE was created as a joke back 2013, but after members of the crypto subreddit r/SatoshiStreetBets began “pumping” the coin and witnessing epic returns from it, the market for meme coins exploded.
SHIB positioned itself as the next big thing and quickly became the cryptocurrency of choice for those who felt that they had missed out on DOGE’s exponential growth. Needing a daring plan to differentiate themselves from the new wave of meme tokens, the developers of SHIB came to the attention of the crypto world after deciding to “gift” 50% of the SHIB’s total supply to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin at the beginning of May. For a brief period in time, rumours that Vitalik chose to own SHIB of his own accord spread like wildfire on social media and the price surged in response.
Dashing the hopes of speculators, Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB (worth $6.7 billion USD (($9.4 billion AUD) at the time) to a COVID relief fund in India and “burned” the remainder of his SHIB holdings, sending the price tumbling. However, these events plastered SHIB across international headlines, and because the total circulating supply of SHIB had been reduced by nearly 50%, the meme coin was primed for growth in the future.
It wasn’t until October 4, when Elon Musk tweeted the following picture of his new Shiba Inu puppy that the token once again began to skyrocket.
Holders of SHIB went crazy, and rumours that Elon Musk owned the coin spread rapidly across Twitter. The price exploded from $0.00000856 USD ($0.00001177 AUD) to $0.00008616 USD ($0.00011478 AUD) on October the 28th, an astonishing gain of 9,965% in just over 3 weeks.
Since then SHIB has tumbled over 70%, dashing the hopes and crypto wallets of many FOMO-fulled investors that “YOLO’d” into the meme coin too late. SHIB’s performance over the past 2 months has sparked fears about SHIB’s ability to return to prices near its all-time high.
So, can investors expect to see SHIB grow in value again? And what do experts and analysts have to say about the coin’s future?
Does Shiba Inu (SHIB) Have Any Real Value?
Ultimately SHIB has no real underlying value. It is a cryptocurrency that only grows in value because of wild speculation, hype, FOMO and the erratic tweets of Elon Musk. While some lucky investors have seen legendary returns from SHIB and other meme coins, the chances of making any serious gains on SHIB moving forward are extremely low.
If investors are willing to gamble on the chance that Elon will post another photo of his puppy, or that a positive rumour about SHIB goes viral, then there may well be some ROI in it for them. But that’s not exactly a sound investment strategy.
Watch Elon Musk and Mark Cuban discuss the potential applications of meme coins in the video below.
Despite the real-world applications of meme coins being discussed by the likes of Mark Cuban and Elon Musk (and Elon Musk recently announcing that Tesla will now accept DOGE as payment for merch), most experts remain sceptical about SHIB’s future growth.
Could Shiba Inu Creators End Up In Jail?
On December 1st 2021, the infamous “Wolf of Wall St,” Jordan Belfort publicly slammed meme coins like SHIB and DOGE, referring to them more colloquially as “s***coins” and declaring that their creators should be jailed.
He told The Sun Online: “I’m a fan of blockchain but there’s a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of s***coins which serve no purpose and are only there to separate people from their money… you hear crazy stories of people making millions and billions but for every person like that there are 10,000 or a 100,000 people getting their ass handed to them in Shiba Inu… it’s not a proper investment.”
If Jordan Belfort, the man that spent 22 months in jail for defrauding investors to the tune of $200 million, is saying that meme coins are dangerous for retail investors, investors would probably do well to heed that advice.
With that being said, here’s what technical analysis can tell us about the future of SHIB.
Shiba Inu’s (SHIB) Price Prediction 2022
If we use technical analysis to predict SHIB’s performance for the beginning of this year, the general outlook is mostly uncertain. SHIB’s trading volume remains low, and while the RSI continues to fall (which means that SHIB is becoming more undervalued) it seems unlikely that buyers will re-enter the market until sentiment changes.
Analysts at FXStreet are extremely unsure of SHIB’s current moves. According to the analysts, the short term outlook for SHIB is mixed, however it seems most likely that more bad news is yet to come. Unless SHIB sees a major change in price action it will continue to slide. However if SHIB can show signs of improvement it may yet be primed for a short-term rally of 27% from its current price to $0.00003736 USD ($0.00005128 AUD).
Shiba Inu (SHIB) Price Prediction 2023
Owing to a lack of any underlying value, it’s almost impossible to make any accurate long-term predictions about SHIB or any speculation-based meme coin.
The automated technical analysis from Wallet Investor is undeniably bullish and forecasts that SHIB can reach $0.0000714 USD ($0.0000992 AUD) by the end of this year, a gain of 148% by mid-next year.
Automated analysis from DigitalCoin also shares the growth sentiment predicting that the price could hit $0.0000502 USD ($0.0000698 AUD) next year, gaining 75% from its current price.
It’s worth noting when using automated technical analysis services such as Wallet Investor or DigitalCoin, the algorithms used to make predictions are basing all predictions off past performance data. When looking at meme-coins in particular, past performance does not guarantee future results.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) Price Prediction Conclusions
- SHIB is an incredibly risky digital asset that has no underlying value. It’s value is based almost entirely on speculation.
- While the price of SHIB may rise in the future with new developments in crypto, it is one of the riskier options on the crypto market.
- Unless you are a technical trader, who understands technical analysis, how to read charts and you can accurately interpret short-term price signals, all investing in SHIB and other meme coins should be treated like gambling.
RISK STATEMENT
This article is of a general nature only, and is intended for solely informational purposes. This is not financial advice. Never invest more money than you can afford to lose into any crypto.