Shiba Inu (SHIB) hit the crypto market with great fanfare last year. In fact, insiders thought it might take over Dogecoin (DOGE), the original dog-themed meme coin. Minted as a direct competitor to Dogecoin, SHIB fell flat in the volatile cryptoverse.
Taking the pack role as omega, SHIB fell behind DOGE when it came to capitalizing on the market. With a cap of $13.9 billion, SHIB comes in at 13th place among all cryptocurrencies. As of October 15, it was priced at $0.00001 per unit and posting a 7.8% loss for the week.
These numbers would lead one to think investors might pass on SHIB. Quite the opposite as the token gained a formidable number of new holders in 2022. As of October 13, 1,223,516 owned Shiba Inu units. On January 3, that number was 1,114,483. This translates to a 9% increase of SHIB holders.
This is surprising as internet search data shows a considerable drop in SHIB searches. July marked the lowest point in a year that users searched for Shiba Inu-related information. Due to this drop, analysts deducted interest for SHIB was waning. Yet the token’s development team is hard at work to get the asset closer to alpha status.
SHIB is in the gaming and non-fungible token (NFT) spaces. Current data reveals that Indian investors, major players in the crypto space, are buying up SHIB units. There are hopes that the asset will boom the way it did shortly after its launch.
Another tactic to raise the value of SHIB is to burn off units. This technique adheres to basic economic principles as reducing the number of coins could increase their demand. This would also increase the price per unit.
Shibburn.com announced on October 13 that 20 billion units had been burned in 24 hours. This brought the number of destroyed units to 410.38 billion. Yet the burning solution could take a considerable number of years. There are over 589 trillion Shiba Inu tokens in circulation, but the total supply is close to 1 quadrillion units.
Based on these numbers, SHIB is going to need a lot more than a 9% increase in ownership to drive up value through burning. Loyalists dream of the day that Shiba Inu hits $1 per unit, but this could take decades and there is no reassurance the asset will ever achieve this value.