In August 2020, an anonymous person (or a group of people) named “Ryoshi” created the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency, which was projected to become a “Dogecoin killer.” The newborn cryptocurrency quickly gained speed and value thanks to tweets from well-known crypto users such as Vitalik Buterin and Elon Musk.
Oppositely to Dogecoin’s Scrypt-based mining, SHIBA INU was launched as an ERC-20 token, built upon the Ethereum blockchain with Proof-of-Work mining, migrating to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. SHIB, like many other dog-inspired crypto-assets, attracted the attention of potential investors. 50% of the total supply was locked in Uniswap and another half was “burnt’ to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin burnt 40% of the coin’s total supply after making a $1 billion worth SHIB donation to India’s Covid-19 Relief Fund. Even though it originated as a meme coin, today it is a massive project with a vibrant ecosystem surrounding it. The project developed its own Shibaswap DEX with two additional tokens – LEASH and BONE; each one serving the specific needs of either DEX or Doggy DAO. Moreover, the coin's team invites dog-inspired artists worldwide to their Shiba Inu Incubator – a place for incentivizing the NFT market.
On June 3, 2022, a Brazilian football club, São Paulo FC, announced that from now users can purchase tickets for games using several cryptocurrencies, one of them being SHIB.