Shiba Inu surges 35% after Coinbase adds support for the meme token

A memecoin is typically a cryptocurrency that is associated with some theme, often as a joke rather than a serious product.

SHIB was trading at $0.00000900 or 33.5% higher at around 12.15pm IST, as per CoinGecko, a digital currency price and information data platform. The token has a market capitalization of around $4.47 billion.

Shiba Inu aspires to be an Ethereum-based alternative to dogecoin (DOGE), the world’s biggest and most popular memecoin with a market cap of over $33 billion. The token was also trading higher by 4% at $0.253684.

Shiba Inu is a breed of hunting dog from Japan, and the coin, which carries its name, is nicknamed the “DOGECOIN KILLER”.

Unlike Bitcoin, which is designed to be scarce, SHIB is intentionally abundant — with a circulating supply of one quadrillion. Today, there are around 500 trillion coins of this meme cryptocurrency in circulation.

Created in August 2020 by an anonymous person known as Ryoshi, Shiba Inu coin’s price is negligible, which allows investors to hold billions and even trillions of this coin.

Memecoins are highly volatile cryptocurrencies that are known to witnesses sharp movements based on news events.

Over the past year, Shiba Inu has delivered a gain of 89,76,638.5%, while dogecoin is 8,933.8% during the same period. However, both the tokens are up to 75% lower compared to their respective all-time highs.

On the other hand, blue-chip crypto, bitcoin, is up around 340% on a yearly basis.

Tesla Inc chief Elon Musk recently tweeted a picture of a new Shiba Inu puppy sleeping on the floor.

Reacting to the tweet, a Floki-themed cryptocurrency called Floki Inu spiked more than 1,000% within a few hours.

Dogecoin had surged over 20% in February after US-based crypto exchange Coinbase said it is listing the token on its professional platform.

Overall, there are 63 meme tokens being tracked by Coingecko with a combined market capitalization of nearly $38 billion.