What is Shiba Inu?

Shiba Inu is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token developed by Ryoshi, a user who prefers to remain unidentified. According to the coin’s website, Shiba Inu is a decentralised meme token that is developing into a thriving ecosystem.

SHIB is a study of decentralised, impromptu community development. Users can possess billions or even trillions of the SHIB token, which is our first token. This ERC-20 ONLY token, also known as the “DOGECOIN KILLER,” can remain much below a penny and quickly surpass Dogecoin (relatively speaking).

According to the whitepaper for the token, an ecosystem made up of three tokens with various resources is what is intended to be built.

The primary currency of the ecosystem is SHIB, which has a maximum supply of 1 quadrillion. The third token, BONE, has a supply of 250,000,000 tokens, followed by LEASH, which has a quantity of 107,646 tokens.

ShibaSwap, a decentralised exchange developed by the token’s creators, enables users to “dig” (offer liquidity), “bury” (stake coins), “fetch” (retrieve tokens from Uniswap or SushiSwap), and “swap” money. This exchange resembles SushiSwap and Uniswa, two other platforms on the Ethereum network.

Shiba Inu vs. Dogecoin

Cryptocurrencies with canine themes have been proliferating over the past year. Meme culture and Elon Musk’s Twitter feed have greatly helped with this.

Dogecoin

During the 2017 cryptocurrency bull run, Dogecoin was created as a satire of the ICO (initial coin offering) market. It was a prank that used the hugely popular “doge” meme as its moniker and was intended to poke fun at all the ludicrous and false scam coins that were launching at the time.

Dogecoin utilises the proof-of-work consensus algorithm since it was developed using code from the Litecoin split of Bitcoin. However, Dogecoin was not assigned a maximum supply like Litecoin was.

Every minute, 10,000 new Dogecoin blocks are discovered, and miners are rewarded with new Doge for each block. According to this, 14.4 million new Doge are generated every day.

Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu promotes itself as a “decentralised meme token that grew into a vibrant ecosystem,” capitalising on Dogecoin’s affinity to the meme culture. It also refers to itself as the “Dogecoin killer,” but how is it different from Dogecoin in reality?

Shiba Inu is an Ethereum blockchain ERC-20 token. This means that rather than having its own blockchain, it has been built upon and is housed on Ethereum’s. On the other hand, Dogecoin has its own blockchain. Ethereum addresses are used to store and send ERC-20 tokens.

Shiba Inu’s decentralised exchange, ShibaSwap, is what actually sets it apart from Dogecoin. Shiba is now a part of the Ethereum decentralised financial ecosystem, giving its users access to features like token swapping, staking, and yield that Dogecoin does not support.

A number of “serious discoveries” from an audit of ShibaSwap including significant centralization and privilege issues where a developer has the power to “withdraw all the ERC20 token boneToken to any arbitrary address.” More critically, all tokens may be lost if this person were to be hacked.

Although these problems have been fixed, ShibaSwap has only had one audit, therefore it is unclear whether the team will maintain the adjustments that they have demonstrated to the auditor.

Is Shiba Inu Coin a Safe Investment? 

The whitepaper for the currency, or several versions of the whitepaper as it has been modified after launch, may be the most revealing indicator of the coin’s authenticity. Shiba Inu was established by Ryoshi, who also founded Ethereum, and sent half of the available quantity to Buterin.

In the whitepaper, Ryoshi is quoted as saying “We gave Vitalik half of the overall supply. Without a weak spot, greatness cannot exist, and as long as VB (Vitalik Buterin) doesn’t take advantage of us, SHIBA will develop and endure.”

However, on May 12th, Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB, which was worth $1 billion at the time, to charity before burning 90% of the coins he still had. He stated that he would also donate the remaining 10% to another deserving organisation.

Buterin warned that anyone creating new coins should never give him coins without his consent in a letter that he included to the transaction.

“Please do not give me coins or power in your project without my permission if you are going to make coins (or daos, or anything else) in the future. I don’t want to be that kind of a power centre. It is preferable to simply print the coins and give them to a deserving organisation directly (but do first speak to them).”

The revelation that Buterin was giving away all of his tokens caused the price of SHIB to crash. Because Buterin owned so much of the token, the community either concluded he invested on purpose or that he was somehow engaged.

The white paper was updated and a new section headed “Vitalik Buterin, Friend of SHIB” was included. This paragraph’s first sentence refers to Ryoshi as a visionary and claims that Buterin is also one. After that, it spells Etherium instead than Ethereum.

“Vitalik Buterin is a visionary like Ryoshi, the founder of Shib. The 27-year-old inventor of Etherium and one of history’s youngest millionaires, VB possessed half of the world’s supply of SHI up until recently.

The new part completely ignores the fact that SHIB has lost over 82% of its value after the contributions and burns were made and instead highlights what happened with Buterin’s gifts as its greatest strength.

When considering SHIB as an investment possibility, a number of items raise serious red lights. The first is the audit findings and the revelation that one developer had the right and authority to immediately remove user tokens from ShibaSwap to whatever address they pleased. The exchange has only had one audit, even though these problems were reportedly fixed.

The fact that the inventor even wired money to Buterin in the first place raises the following red flag. Although it’s nearly impossible to determine the creator’s true motivation, it seems like a marketing strategy. The fact that Buterin owned the token and was an investor was frequently mentioned in postings in the Shib Reddit forum, which raised people’s expectations.

Such Reddit articles frequently claim that Buterin controlled SHIB and that the cryptocurrency was headed to the moon.

This problem is made even worse by the new whitepaper’s claim that Buterin is a project friend even though it is obvious he has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, Ryoshi’s claim that Vitalik Buterin is a visionary like himself does not exactly exude believability.

Making an investment requires some element of speculation, as is true for the majority of cryptocurrencies. Despite the fact that SHIB has received a lot of attention in the past year as a result of meme culture, it is difficult to apply any value from an investing standpoint.

The main issues with SHIB stem from the acts of its author. It appears dishonest to provide Buterin half of the supply before modifying the whitepaper after the donations and burn. The claim that Buterin is a “friend of SHIB” is also a significant exaggeration, if not outright untrue.

While SHIB does offer a decentralised exchange and its own little ecosystem, it’s not obvious how safe it is to use compared to other platforms like Uniswap that have through many more audits. Purchasing SHIB is akin to purchasing a lottery ticket for one of the 11,000+ altcoins.