Shiba Inu Up 385% in a Week, Becomes 12th Largest Cryptocurrency

Meme coin Shiba Inu continues its meteoric rise, soaring by another 50% over the day to become the world’s 12th largest cryptocurrency.

By Andrew Asmakov

There seems to be little in the way of Shiba Inu’s (SHIB) latest advance, as the Dogecoin alternative jumped by another 50% in the last 24 hours.

Hitting a local high of $0.0003473 on Thursday, SHIB is also up an eye-watering 385% in the last seven days, with the latest price action taking the coin to the 12th spot in the crypto rankings, according to CoinGecko.

With a market cap of nearly $17 billion, SHIB has flashed past the likes of Chainlink (LINK), Litecoin (LTC), Avalanche (AVE), and Uniswap (UNI).

Described as “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building,” Shiba Inu was created by a pseudonymous developer under the alias of Ryoshi and launched in August 2020.

Shiba Inu on the loose

The token has been on a tear since the start of the week, with one of the most likely reasons behind the spike being yet another canine-themed tweet from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Last Sunday, Musk posted an image of his new Shibu Inu pup, Floki, sending waves of enthusiasm across the legions of SHIB fans and even prompting the #SHIB hashtag to trend on Twitter.

In another milestone, data from Etherscan shows that the army of SHIBU holders has now surpassed the 700,000 mark.

Shiba Inu’s jump comes amidst a wider surge across the entire crypto market, with Bitcoin up 30% over the last week.

The world’s leading cryptocurrency revisited the $55,000 mark on Wednesday, however, at press time it’s changing hands around $54,000.

Ethereum is up 25% in the last week, trading at $3,5700 by the time of writing.