Shiba Inu is a meme cryptocurrency that was launched in 2020 by a person using the pseudonym “Ryoshi”. The project is heavily inspired by the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, and also features the Shiba Inu dog breed in its branding. In contrast to Dogecoin, which has its own blockchain, Shiba Inu is issued on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 token.

During the SHIB token launch, half of the supply was sent to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (who is not involved with the project in any way). The project framed this as a token burn. Buterin did eventually burn the vast majority of his SHIB holdings and sold the rest of his tokens to fund charitable donations.

SHIB saw a significant spike in popularity in 2021 and became the second-largest meme coin by market cap, second only to Dogecoin. In addition, SHIB is one of the most popular penny cryptos at the moment, making it one of the leading candidates for the next cryptocurrency to explode in 2023.

Why Shiba Inu?

The Shiba Inu project is currently working on Shibarium, a layer 2 platform for Ethereum designed to provide more efficient transactions to users. Shibarium is currently in the testnet phase. Shibarium’s “Puppynet” testnet has been seeing some encouraging activity, with over 800,000 transactions being completed so far. In addition, the testnet has seen more than 100,000 unique wallet addresses.

The Shibarium platform will use the BONE token for gas fees and validator incentives. In addition, the base gas fees paid on Shibarium will be used to burn SHIB tokens, reducing SHIB’s supply over the time.

Shibarium will provide an alternative for users that want to avoid the high transaction costs on the Ethereum mainnet. Per the Shiba Inu development team, they’re primarily looking to target the metaverse and gaming sectors with their layer 2.

The upcoming release of Shibarium will be one of the biggest milestones in the history of the Shiba Inu project, so it will definitely be worth watching the SHIB markets moving forward. However, don’t expect SHIB to reach $1 or $0.50 anytime soon.