Watch out for the meme-coin, Shiba Inu, as it attracted many crypto exchanges this season of a downtrend. Even though reaching a value of 0.01 cent was still far-fetched, digital asset adoption wasn’t. The SHIB community established itself as one of the strongest groups in crypto and managed to land the asset on giant exchanges, including Robinhood in April. It also made its way to one of the top U.S. crypto exchanges, Bittrex, and has now begun trading.
It was interesting to see that although Shiba Inu had a comical beginning as a rival to another meme coin Dogecoin, over time it was slowly shedding the image of just a funny cryptocurrency. Like in the case of DOGE, association with Elon Musk pulled the digital asset from pits of low values to gaining some usability lately. We may be able to see a similar but larger boom in the SHIB ecosystem due to the multiple projects that were already en route.
Shiba Inu’s changing landscape
The latest update for making SHIB more usable comes from NOWPayments. The popular payment gateway added Shiba Inu to its platform allowing users to directly withdraw fiat currency for SHIB tokens. This was a huge uptick in making SHIB useful for its holders and traders.
Additionally, the SHIB Metaverse is coming and the Shiba Inu team is building for the same. Recently it added David Kern, former Principle Technical Artist for Sony at Zipper Interactive, to the team. Kern’s skills in graphic design, video production, 3D modeling, animation, level building, and production management for games across platforms are something the team will use to its full potential.
Meanwhile, the team along with the SHIB developer, Shytoshi Kusumar announced the upcoming launch of stablecoin, Shi. Shi will act as a common stablecoin within the ecosystem and will counter and balance payments without being affected by market volatility. However, it was not the only new coin to be introduced to the users.
Shytoshi revealed this earlier in a blog post that noted designing a reward token called TREAT for users. However, the network did not want to overwhelm the ecosystem with yet another token without a use case, so it was not going to rush into it. Kusuma outlined that TREAT would entail a limited supply and its use-case will not be limited to Shibarium, layer-2 solution, but will make way into the Metaverse.
With a wave of developments coming to Shiba Inu, it would be interesting to see how the new crypto asset bridges the gap between hype and usability. Only when it becomes more usable will it be able to transition from a meme currency to a cryptocurrency.