The price of the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency — a meme-based crypto token — has doubled in the last few days due to speculation over a major whale purchase.
- A whale is often considered an investor who purchases a lot of a digital asset before selling it down the road.
Per Yahoo Finance, there has been “one mysterious whale” who has been “buying up massive amounts of Shibu Inu.”
- In fact, one of these whales bought 6.2 trillion Shib coins, which cost about $44 million, per Yahoo Finance.
The cryptocurrency has seen increased social media attention in recent days. It began when Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a picture of his dog, a Shiba Inu breed, named Floki. This inspired social media users to tweet out #SHIB without end, sending the hashtag to the top of Twitter, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
- That jump was coupled with a recent spike in September, when the Shiba Inu coin soared by 35% after it was added to the Coinbase app, which allows people to trade and buy cryptocurrency, according to Mint, which monitors financial and cryptocurrency news.
Ishan Arora — who works with Tykhe Block Ventures, a crypto hedge fund — said Shiba Inu might be launching a new project, which has increased interest in the crypto token, per Yahoo Finance.
- “It started as a meme coin with no use case but that is being changed as the team seems to be working on certain things like a decentralised exchange,” he said.