In the current phase of the cryptocurrency bull cycle, the altcoin market seems to be completely dominated by meme tokens. While whales and institutions are still focused mainly on Bitcoin, and on quality altcoins like Ethereum, Solana or Cardano, the imagination of retail investors is fully captivated by meme tokens based on cats, dogs and TV shows. But is the growing popularity of increasingly shady meme projects really a sign that we’re at the top of the current market cycle?
Shiba Inu Loses Almost 30% In a Week - Is the SHIB Pump Over?
On October 28th, the SHIB price reached an all-time high of $0.00008845, which briefly made it surpass DOGE and become one of the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem. While many Shiba Inu bagholders were hoping that the most successful Dogecoin clone will soon remove another zero and reach $0.0001, the price has crashed, and now it looks like SHIB will gain back a zero instead of losing one.
A correction in price was of course natural after such a massive pump, especially for a token with no intrinsic value. However, many factors point to the fact that the steep decline in SHIB price might have been more than just a temporary correction, and that Shiba Inu might soon be replaced by another meme token as rapidly as it has previously replaced Dogecoin.
For one, nobody is certain as to what the circulating supply of SHIB truly is. CoinMarketCap, the most popular and respected cryptocurrency tracker in the world, has recently increased its circulating supply of Shiba Inu from 394,796,000,000,000 SHIB to 549,095,509,738,353 SHIB. The Shiba Inu community is convinced that this is just a simple error, but CoinMarketCap has still not changed this “mistake” - so there’s also a possibility that the Shiba Inu team has simply added 155 trillion coins to the supply while forgetting to inform anyone about it.
The circulating supply controversy has also stopped Shiba Inu from being listed on the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken and on the trading platform Robinhood. While the community was almost convinced that these listings are imminent, they now seem to be postponed indefinitely.
Finally, the SHIB price was affected by the fact that the second largest whale has moved SHIB tokens worth around $2.3 billion to four different wallets, presumably with the intention of selling them. Since Shiba Inu is an extremely centralized project with a few wallets holding almost 70% of the total supply, the price can plummet instantly if any of the whales start to sell.
SQUID Token Makes History By Becoming One of the Fastest Rug Pulls Ever
Retail investors are ready to buy anything - it doesn’t even need to have a dog or a cat in the logo. SQUID is a meme token with no other value except sharing the name with the popular Netflix show Squid Game, and it has managed to appreciate in price rapidly by 230,000% within a few days - only to drop by almost 100% in an instant.
It’s worth noting that the SQUID token was only accessible on one exchange - PancakeSwap. According to the users’ reports, while it was easy to buy the token, it was impossible to sell it. In other words, anyone who “invested” in SQUID has lost money.
Meme Cryptocurrencies Are Here to Stay - But Which Will Be the Next SHIB?
The idea of a meme token is now deeply engraved into the imagination of retail crypto investors, and there’s no denying that while these tokens are a terrible long term investment, they can be immensely valuable as speculative assets due to their ability to grow in price rapidly. Although the SHIB pump happened just a few days ago, some meme token fanatics are already looking for the next Shiba Inu.
It’s hard to say exactly how many meme coins exist, but the number might already be nearing one thousand. Most of these assets are very niche and only have a few thousand holders at best.
New meme tokens are created every day, with most of the trending cryptocurrencies on CoinMarketCap currently being such unique and original projects like “DogeMoon”, “ShibaZilla”, “MarsRise” or “BabyShibaInu”. But will any of these tokens be able to become the next big meme cryptocurrency, or will the investors decide to return to Dogecoin one day?
XRP Fails to Deliver On Vague Adoption Promises
Although XRP is still one of the top 10 largest coins and even though it has managed to gain almost 7% over the past few days, the week cannot be considered successful for Ripple fans. While the On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) volume of the XRP is growing, the investors are concerned with the lack of transparency of Ripple Labs Inc. - it’s unknown whether the ODL volume is attributed to Ripple’s partners actually utilizing XRP in real-life scenarios, or is it simply a pumped number with no relation to actual adoption of XRP.