Dogecoin spinoff Shiba Inu rose to a six-week high on Friday after Tesla chief executive Elon Musk tweeted what he will name his Shiba Inu dog. Musk, who’s quite active on social media and likes to tweet on all sorts of things from electric cars to space to cryptocurrencies to his 57 million followers, tweeted his “Shiba Inu will be named Floki”.
Immediately after his tweet at 7.03 am, digital crypto token Shiba Inu rose 16 per cent by 7.23 am ET to $0.00000790. Shiba Inu is a meme coin that brands itself as a “Dogecoin killer”. Dogecoin is a more popular cryptocurrency, but Shiba Inu is a dog meme-based crypto token that has also garnered huge interest from investments lately. The current rise in China-based Shiba Inu has made it the 28th most valuable cryptocurrency token.
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Shiba Inu features the image of a Shiba Inu hunting dog like Dogecoin, the sixth-largest crypto in terms of m-cap. Both Shiba Inu and Dogecoin have attracted a significant fan base this year and their value continues to rise higher. Dogecoin has its own blockchain but Shiba Inu — sold as SHIB tokens — is built on an existing blockchain.
Elon is also a strong supporter of Dogecoin, which gained as much as 25 per cent on Friday after it received support from Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Meanwhile, it’s still unclear if Musk’s reference to Shiba Inu was purely coincidental or was done to jack up its prices.
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Shiba Inu came to the worldwide limelight after Vitalik Buterin, who is the co-founder of Ethereum, donated $1 billion worth of coins to Covid-19 relief work in India last month. Vitalik has also donated in the form of Ethereum, which is his own cryptocurrency.
As per reports, Buterin donated around 500 ETH and over 50 trillion SHIB (Shiba Inu), a meme coin that is worth $1.14 billion, to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund set up by Indian tech entrepreneur Sandeep Nailwal.
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