Shiba Inu (SHIB) might be one of the most recognizable meme coins — but it has been largely overshadowed in recent months. En masse, traders have turned either to Dogecoin (DOGE) the original meme coin, or other new projects emerging on the Solana (SOL) blockchain.
As a reaction to this, the team behind SHIB had refocused their efforts on utility. The introduction of Shibarium, a layer-2 scaling solution, has improved transaction efficiency and reduced fees. In addition, the developers have also introduced BONE, a governance token, and TREAT, which is designed to reward community engagement and incentivize participation.
Those developments, however, have not managed to overpower the bearish sentiment that currently dominates the cryptocurrency market.
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At press time, a single Shiba Inu token was changing hands at a price of $0.00001271. That figure represents a 39.95% year-to-date (YTD) loss. For reference, Bitcoin (BTC) has lost 13.08% in value since the start of the year, while the S&P 500 benchmark index has marked a 4.33% decline in that timeframe.
However, traders and investors shouldn’t discount SHIB’s reorientation toward utility. The project reached a significant milestone — 1.5 million SHIB holders and 10 million blocks on the Shibarium network, per data retrieved by Finbold from Etherscan and Shibariumscan on March 19.
Unlike some other high-profile projects, SHIB has had little to no luck in securing institutional support and interest. With that being said, there’s obviously a degree of healthy, organic growth at play. Let’s take a closer look at whether or not the asset’s fortunes could change in the near future.
The Shiba Inu community is stable and whales are holding steady
SHIB’s primary draw isn’t positive price action. In fact, it’s just the opposite. A significant rebound could prove to be quite profitable for a short to mid-term trade. So, is there a case for a SHIB surge? A couple of factors point to it being a distinct possibility.
Finbold’s own artificial intelligence (AI) price prediction tool, which gauged market sentiment and key technical indicators, set an average price target of $0.0000156833 by March 31 for SHIB, which corresponds to a 23.39% upside.
On top of that, although it is experiencing significant fluctuations, SHIB’s burn rate has been on the uptake since late January. In the last 24 hours, despite a 41.29% drop, investors have burned 9,682,894 SHIB per Shibburn — almost three times as much at the time of Finbold’s January coverage.
Despite the aforementioned lack of institutional support, the project’s lead developer, Shytoshi Kusama, recently expressed optimism regarding the potential for a SHIB exchange-traded fund (ETF), following Bitwise Asset Management’s filing for a DOGE ETF.
In addition, whales, which have historically had an outsized impact on SHIB’s price action, have kept their holdings relatively stable since mid-2023, per on-chain analytics platform Glassnode.
If market sentiment improves, Shiba Inu might well be among the best-performing digital assets on account of its underperformance since the start of the year.
Featured image via Shutterstock
