Cadbury is selling happiness since time immemorial. Hindustan Unilever is building relationships with it’s users. Procter and Gamble is carving their own niche for decades now. However, a few years ago, came along a player that gave these top notch marketers a bang for their buck. Yes, I am talking about Baba Ramdev and his Patanjali. Without signing any Bollywood model, Baba Ramdev drove the wave of Ayurveda across the country.
However, Patanjali still had a very competitive product to offer. It found it’s product market fit amongst Indians who believe in the power of alternate science.
The HUL and Patanjali of Crypto:
Drawing a parlance in the crypto industry, we have Bitcoin the HUL. The OG medium of exchange built to revolutionize the world. BTC didn’t have to market itself as it had that function inbuilt behind the veil of mysterious Nakamoto. Mystery around the creators spread the word for BTC like nothing else.
But you know what? This was the decade where internet was reaching the masses. Every meme had a potential to blow up. Everybody could be famous momentarily. Fortunes were not restricted to high rise buildings of Bandra and legacy actors living in them.
So, we came across a Patanjali. This time, in the form of Doge Coin. A joke that blew out of proportion. So much so that it entered the coveted top 10 cryptos by market cap in the industry. What makes me ponder further is the fact that it isn’t even adding value to the market.
Why Dogecoin Can Never be Bitcoin?
You see the entire genesis of BTC was around a couple of factors. It wanted to create a decentralized, scarce money. Why? Because historically, governments had been known for screwing up by printing more money. In essence, it was meant to democratize wealth.
On the other hand Dogecoin simply wanted to take a toll on BTC. And with unlimited supply took birth the doggy coin of crypto industry that soon picked up crazy momentum.
But Why Dogecoin is a Thing?
Well, the next legitimate question in this series is, if Dogecoin is such a joke, why is it even a thing? For some context, last 24 hour trading volume for $DOGE was $794,886,395. This is serious money for any cryptocurrency, leave aside a god damn meme. So why can’t people stop talking about it?
For that, let’s rewind a little. Dogecoin had little to no value soon after it’s existence. Therefore, it became an easy gateway for people entering into the crypto market. They could hold ONE UNIT of a digital asset, unlike BTC which was out of reach for many in terms of buying a whole of it.
Secondly, since it had very little value, people started using it as tips on platforms like reddit. It would also be used as donations at times. Eg. Once Indian Paralympics team was funded in Dogecoin by a community to travel and take part in the event.
Thirdly, the dog! Shiba Inu is a cute creature. Although it was meant to be a joke, a lot of people get drawn towards the currency because it features a cute dog.
Fourth. The Dogefather. Yes. Since crypto markets are unregulated and there’s no SEC or SEBI involved to check the communication going out in public from CXOs of the company, Elon Musk took this opportunity to Pump Doge. He tweeted about it quite often. Other stars like Snoop Dogg, Gene Simmons followed the suit.
What Happened Next?:
Yup. It’s exactly what you had never expected for. Dogecoin blew up and reached to an ATH of Rs. 58. Mind it, this journey began from the cost of a fraction of Paisa.
Elon Musk even came on a record to say that it would be fun to watch if something that wants to become the mainstream currency (BTC) would be overtaken by something that was started as a joke (DOGE).
The Doge Killer:
While Doge has been now stable between the range of Rs. 18 – Rs. 25 for the past 4 odd months now, the ripples of enormous success of the infamous dog are far from stabilization. In October of 2020, we found yet another dog growling in the crypto space.
It termed itself as the Doge Killer. Yes, I am talking about Shiba Inu. Founded by anonymous entity that goes by the pseudonym called Ryoshi, Shiba Inu is built on Ethereum blockchain. This is in contrast to Doge which has it’s own blockchain.
But why is $SHIB called the DOGE killer?
A. Smart Contracts:
The Dogecoin was an abandoned baby. It’s own developers exited the project by selling their holdings for a Honda Civic back in 2015. Although Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin are onboarded on to the project now in 2021, it still has a long way to go.
On the other hand, Shiba Inu, built on Ethereum has the capability of executing smart contracts. For the uninitiated, Smart Contracts are self executing pieces of code that are deemed to be the backbone of dApps or decentralized applications.
This enables the whole world of DeFi for SHIB where you can lend, borrow, charge interest, earn interest using $SHIB.
B. Ecosystem:
Apart from being a token, $SHIB is trying to be an ecosystem where you can provide liquidity, earn LP tokens called bones, You could also BURY your bones which is essentially a way of staking your LP tokens to earn further interest.
There’s also a NFT market place where you can buy Shiboshis.
For the serious crypto community out there, I can understand your cringe while reading this. For the ones who don’t understand what this is about, its a model similar to what top notch DEXs like Uniswap or Pancakeswap have in store.
But Why is SHIB a Thing?
Yet again, it’s our crazy billionaire who added fuel to this fire. In the March of 2021, Elon Musk tweeted that has got a Shiba Inu dog. That pumped the price of the token by 300%.
Also, the team behind SHIB did something very interesting. They sent half of all the SHIB that ever exists to Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum). This was meant to be a marketing gimmick to showcase that Vitalik also holds some SHIB.
Vitalik smarty donated 10% of it to India for Covid relief fund and rest of it was burnt by him. Which by the way means sending the tokens to an inaccessible address. This means that the tokens will never be back in supply.
Apart from that, it’s that little ecosystem they have created that tries to drive SHIB away from the perception of a meme coin.
What Happened Next?
Recently, about 20 days ago, SHIB hit an all time high of $0.00008845. I invested my Rs. 2000 in SHIB about 2 months ago. I pulled out about 15,000 at that point. With so much euphoria around this crypto, people believe that it will soon hit a penny or a dollar even may be.
But before you buy into these statement, here’s some perspective. Market Cap is the metric to gauge the average price of each unit of cryptocurrency/stock. It is calculated by multiplying the number of tokens in circulation by the current price. So if $SHIB ever hits a cent, it’s market cap would reach $4 trillion. This is greater than the market cap of entire crypto market. I’d leave it up to you to think the possibility of the same.
Conclusion:
In totality, it is really hard to predict how meme coin market is going to perform in the future. For all we know, it is just getting started. Secondly, it does not end at Shiba Inu, there’s a new coin called Floki Inu which is knocking the doors of top 10. It’s really far as of now, but hey, we couldn’t anticipate Doge and SHIB to be there any way.
What do you think?
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Until next time..
