Shiba Inu coin has shot up in value by more than 200% in the last week, rising on the back of Robinhood rumours and a tweet from Tesla CEO, Elon Musk.
According to Coinbase, the coin’s price has increased by 230.19% since 29 September and by 51.4% in the last 24 hours. However, its value remains at a fraction of a cent, standing at $0.000022.
Despite the huge jump in price the cryptocurrency remains short of the heights it reached in May. However, the coin has grown significantly since September, when it was made available to thousands of extra cryptocurrency traders due to being listed on Coinbase.
Overall, the cryptocurrency market was down by 0.54% on Wednesday. The drop was led by falls from Ethereum, Binance Coin and Solana. This was marginally offset by price rises for Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Tether.
Robinhood
The coin, named after a Japanese dog breed, is also enjoying a boost due to rumours it will be listed on Robinhood. Excited tweeters are urging the platform to list the cryptocurrency. Additionally, a change.org petition calling for the move has amassed over 200,000 signatures.
Robinhood already supports trading of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin, but the company has released no official word on the rumours linking it to Shiba Inu coin. A listing on a high profile and highly accessible platform like Robinhood could be a game-changer for the coin, with increased accessibility having driven the growth of cryptocurrency prices in the past. For example,
Robinhood did not respond to a request for comment from ValueTheMarkets.
Musk weighs in
You might assume that the tweet from Musk that partially catalysed this jump in price was some sort of ringing endorsement of the coin. However, the South African billionaire was not that explicit. Instead, he simply tweeted a picture of his Shiba Inu breed puppy, cryptically captioning the image “Floki Frunkpuppy”. It seems this was enough to spark excitement about the coin for some buyers.
Hargreaves Lansdown personal finance analyst, Sarah Coles, said this had “demonstrated just what an enormous influence Elon Musk has on this market”.
She continued: “Crypto fans are always on the hunt for the next stellar success to try and ride same trajectory as bitcoin, and saw even a dog-related tweet as enough of a sign that Shiba Inu could be the next big thing.
“Whereas some coins promise a defined use case, demand is still coming mainly from traders hoping to catch a short ride on a wave of price rises, rather than investing them over the longer term confident in their development as a means for exchange.”
Musk has previously been a vocal supporter of Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency on which Shiba Inu coin is based. In August, The SpaceX founder joined billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban in asserting that the coin was the “strongest” cryptocurrency for payments. In May the Tesla CEO asked his Twitter followers if the car company should start accepting payments made in Dogecoin.
Tesla announced in March that it would begin accepting payments in rival cryptocurrency Bitcoin, but Musk rowed back on these comments in May after activists raised concerns about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining and transactions.
Volatility
Before making the decision to invest in Shiba Inu coin, it is worth noting the cryptocurrency’s volatility. In May, the coin’s price made it to a high of $0.00003389 after rocketing upwards. However, its value then dropped by more than 50% in the space of four days. Shiba Inu coin finished that month at $0.00008776.
Coles commented: “Investors should treat trading in crypto currencies with extreme caution, and dabble at the edges of their investment portfolio, only with money they can afford to lose.”
Shiba Inu coin was released by an anonymous creator who uses the pseudonym Ryoshi in August 2020 as an alternative to Dogecoin within the Ethereum ecosystem. This allows people to create apps for the exchange of Shiba Inu coin without the need for an intermediary.