[Daily] Is Shiba Inu for real?

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. It’s a brand new week. An unconfirmed report claims that FTX may allow users to withdraw their funds trapped in its wallets. But these are users specific to its entity in Japan. The caveat is that the withdrawal was supposed to go live now. And that has not happened. Yet.

Moving on, today we talk about the Shibarium’s L2 upgrade and Helium’s move to Solana.

As of Sunday, 4PM IST

The markets recovered. Bitcoin stabilised even as concerns of regulatory concerns remain. Ethereum had a small rally as bulls returned to the token. Nasdaq slipped on slowdown worries among investors. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended lower on inflation concerns.

Is SHIB Onto Something?

Almost two years ago, Shiba Inu co-founder Ryoshi (not his real name) put out a blog post (now deleted) about a big upgrade–Shibarium. It was a Layer 2 ecosystem on top of the base Ethereum blockchain. The market was thrilled. Shiba Inu, which was largely seen (correctly) as a meme coin, was building a use case. Cut to February 2023. The upgrade is still “coming soon”.

A year after the Shibarium teaser, Ryoshi quit the Shiba Inu project altogether. Nobody knows why. But the upgrade led to a SHIB rally. Every now and then, when the meme crypto turns lukewarm, another pseudonymous SHIB co-founder Shytoshi Kusamai puts out a tweet saying “soon”. Frankly, it has gotten a little tiresome.

There is no launch date yet. The only ones that have benefited so far from the Shibarium buzz are Shiba Inu and sister tokens Doge Killer and Bone.

FYI The Shiba Inu ecosystem has SHIB as the central token, which is used for payments. Bone is the governance token and Doge Killer aka Leash is a token for Shiba VIPs.

What makes Shibarium different?Shiba Inu is the stuff of memes. A crypto with not many use cases. And that was the motivation behind Shibarium. SHIB wanted to break out of the meme mould.

The upgrade will increase the usability of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. From DeFi, dApps, gaming, metaverse, and web3, Shibarium will reportedly support a slew of industries.

Sounds too good to be trueWhen things sound too good to be true, they usually are. The Shibarium hype has been a pull factor that helped SHIB hit a peak of 1.3 million wallets. In the past week, the token rose ~6%, though it’s priced way below $0.0001.

Sister token Doge Killer hit ~$472 on Thursday, a 11% increase in a week. This was amidst rumours that Shibarium Beta will launch in February. Of course, Shytoshi is silent on the launch timelines.

Meanwhile, Shytoshi complained that 50 projects which he promised to build on Shibarium, are MIA.

Dumpers, however, continue to dump. In January, almost $5 million worth SHIB was dumped in the midst of the Shibarium chatter. This immediately caused a 9% price crash. On Wednesday, bankrupt crypto broker Voyager sent $3.4 million worth Shiba Inu tokens to an exchange. That’s a sign of a mass dump.

The flip-flop over Shibarium has also piqued the market’s curiosity. Who is Shytoshi Kusama? Is he friends with Elon Musk? Or is the man himself?

Co-incidentally, Shytoshi put out another cryptic tweet that said “MAY be soon”. Now the market expects the Shibarium upgrade in May. But we won’t be convinced unless there is an actual launch date.

Helium+Solana=?

Solana finally found something to celebrate. After months of being on the sell list after the FTX crash, its backers paraded some good news. Helium network will complete its migration to Solana at the end of March.

What does it mean for Helium?Temporarily its price was up ~10%, which was the second highest growth for the token in February and third highest since the start of 2023. While the price traded up, there was not a significant increase in volume of the token. Let’s see how long this rally lasts

What does it mean for Solana?Another use case. After the dump, there were questions about how many projects would stay on Solana. A few are left but an interesting one coming in does seem like something to celebrate.

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