The Shiba Inu coin—a cryptocurrency born to become the “Dogecoin killer“—has finally challenged its ultimate rival.
SHIB, which saw astounding rises and falls in the second half of this year as fans rallied to inflate the coin’s value, has had a record-setting October. In the past 24 hours, the token’s price surged roughly 30% to an all-time high of $0.000067 midday Wednesday. That brings the token’s monthly rise to roughly 830%, and its yearly rise to a mind-boggling 91,000,000%.
The absolute price of SHIB may not seem like much—in fact it’s a speck of a penny—but if you had invested $2 in the coin in January, you could have close to $2 million today.
Created in August 2020, the Shiba Inu coin bears the face of a Shiba Inu dog as a parody of the wildly popular meme token Dogecoin. And according to charts, the spinoff has finally bested the original. As of midday Wednesday, Shiba Inu is the ninth biggest cryptocurrency and Dogecoin is the eleventh, as calculated by CoinGecko.
Cryptocurrencies are famously volatile with prices perpetually in flux, so SHIB versus DOGE’s dynamic could still shift in a matter of moments. The Shiba Inu coin currently holds just a slight edge over Dogecoin; their total market worth—somewhere in the territory of $32 billion—differs by less than 1%. It’s also unclear what caused the latest surge; some suspect it could be linked to a recent petition for cult trading platform Robinhood to list the Shiba Inu coin, which is gaining momentum online. Regardless, it’s a landmark victory for SHIB investors who dreamed of propelling the token beyond its forefather for months.
However, Dogecoin still has more mainstream footholds: Major league sports teams in baseball and basketball have started partnering with the token, and AMC Theaters said in October it was working to accept Dogecoin as payment for movie tickets by the end of the year. The token’s lead was also shaped by tech titan Elon Musk, whose cryptic tweets habitually favor DOGE over SHIB.
DOGE’s value dropped over 11% at one point Wednesday, although it has since recovered some ground. Other major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ether are also down.
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