Doge Owner’s Adopted Shiba Inu Neiro Kicks Off Memecoin Frenzy
Kabosu, the iconic Shiba Inu who inspired the original Doge meme and subsequently the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, passed away in May. Her legacy, however, continues to influence crypto. Last Saturday, Kabosu’s owner, known online as "Kabosumama," announced the adoption of Neiro, a 10-year-old rescue Shiba Inu.
Kabosumama took to Twitter to clarify that she does not endorse any crypto project aside from OwnTheDoge, which owns the original Doge photo and intellectual property. OwnTheDoge is a project that fractionalized the original Doge photo into the DOG coin, distinct from Dogecoin, which has no official ties to Kabosu.
Despite this clarification, numerous Neiro tokens were launched on the Solana blockchain. One of these tokens quickly achieved a market cap of $89 million within just three hours of Neiro's introduction on Twitter. As this token surged on Saturday, debates erupted among Crypto Twitter users about its legitimacy. Some users argued that another Neiro token, launched an hour earlier, was the authentic one.
During a Twitter Spaces session hosted by the creators of the first Neiro coin, market dynamics began to shift. The initially lesser-valued Neiro coin surged to a nearly $20 million market cap, while the previously leading token plummeted to $23 million. Crypto Twitter figure Ansem's involvement drew significant criticism, with some blaming him for the market's turbulence. Critics accused him of influencing traders to move funds from the higher-valued token to the earlier one.
Throughout this turmoil, Solana-based meme coins inspired by Neiro generated substantial trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), surpassing the trading volume of any individual Ethereum layer-2 network. Raydium, a Solana DEX, processed $2.5 billion in trading volume over the weekend, with $1.37 billion on Sunday alone, the highest single-day volume for July.
