In 2021, the meme coin market saw exponential growth, especially the dog-themed meme coins. One of the most popular “breeds” is Dogecoin (DOGE) and its rival Shiba Inu (SHIB).
Meme coins are meme-inspired cryptocurrencies. They tend to be highly volatile compared to major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is likely because meme coins are heavily community-driven tokens. Their prices are usually influenced by social media and online community sentiments. This often brings a lot of hype but also FOMO and financial risk. While it’s true that some traders became rich with meme coins, many lost money due to market volatility.
Some say 2021 was the year of “dogs” for crypto. The doggy duo Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) led the meme coin pack and skyrocketed in price and market capitalization. DOGE has gained over 8,000% last year. Its competitor, SHIB, has pumped more than 60,000,000% in the same period.
Everyone wants to believe in something. Enter memes, the supposed future of money according to enthusiastic crypto investors.
The term “meme” comes from Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” A genetic meme, as described by Dawkins, is a gene that copies itself and proliferates throughout the species by way of Darwinian natural selection. A cultural meme is, similarly, behavior or idea that spreads throughout a culture even faster. If I share a joke with you and you share it with your friends, we create a ripple effect until the joke is known on a collective level, changing the species forever.
And when that joke is attached to an exchangeable value, it can theoretically become an actual currency. New crypto investors like meme tokens because of High brand recognition, Active community, Cheap entry point.
Leading the meme coin market with the highest market capitalization is Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB). After the success of DOGE and SHIB, a large number of dog-themed meme coins entered the market and gained traction within the second half of 2021. Dogelon Mars, Samoyedcoin, Samoyedcoin are a few other popular meme tokens
Dogecoin (DOGE)
Dogecoin (DOGE) was created in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It was inspired by the meme of a Shiba Inu dog and was intended to be a joke cryptocurrency to attract mainstream attention. As a fork of Litecoin (LTC), DOGE adopts the same Proof of Work (POW) mechanism, and it has no maximum supply.
Tesla now lets customers buy select items of merchandise using Dogecoin, the company’s CEO Elon Musk has announced. Products buyable with the meme-based cryptocurrency include the Cyberquad for Kids (12,020 doge / around $2,320), the Giga Texas Belt Buckle (835 doge / around $161), and the Cyberwhistle (300 doge / around $58).
Users can spend their Dogecoin at:
- Markets: Suchlist, Crypto Treasure
- Food & Drinks: Burger Bear, Salts Worldwide
- Hosting: AllGamer
- Fashion: MaxiShopM, Above Wall Street, RepDOGE
- Goods: The BoomCase, MyNerdLife, Doge Door, OneGrainOf, North Treasure, Doge Fresh
- Services: Wallabis, Nodex, CJS CD Keys, Lager im Viertel
- Ebooks: Mike Connel Ministries
- Travel: Veloleo
Shiba Inu (SHIB)
Shiba Inus (SHIB) is the rival of DOGE and is often referred to as the “Dogecoin killer”. SHIB is also named after a Japanese dog breed. It was created by an anonymous developer named Ryoshi in August 2020. The main difference between DOGE and SHIB is that the latter has a limited supply of 1 quadrillion tokens, of which 50% were burnt and donated to charity. SHIB’s ecosystem also includes a decentralized exchange, an NFT art incubator, NFTs, and an NFT game.
Newegg Commerce, a leading tech-focused North American e-retailer, has announced that it will accept Shiba Inu (SHIB) cryptocurrency as a form of payment on its platform in time for the holidays. The company made the news official on a grand scale with a massive digital out-of-home (DOOH) campaign displayed on The Reef, North America’s largest DOOH billboard. Situated at the intersection of the busy I-10 and I-110 in downtown Los Angeles, The Reef is a larger-than-life platform for Newegg to drop its latest crypto news.
Newegg has a longstanding reputation as a pioneer in the crypto space. Newegg was the first major e-commerce company to accept Bitcoin as a payment method in 2014 through its partnership with BitPay. Subsequently, Newegg was among the first to accept Dogecoin in early-2021, followed by Litecoin in July 2021, further cementing Newegg.com as a preferred destination for online shoppers who want to pay with cryptocurrency.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) has partnered up with Welly’s on 4th February 2022, a blockchain-based Italian fast food restaurant for a Shiba Inu-themed dining experience for fans and customers in Naples, Italy.
Companies that are already accepting Shiba Inu payments consist of the following :
Integrated by Flexa (Backed by Gemini): GameStop, Nerdy Flames, Ask The Doctor, Petco, Lowe’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Ulta Beauty, Shiba Tea & Coffee, Shiba Mobile Repair, and AMC Theatres. Travala.com
Giant payment gateways such as Bitpay, Coinpayments, Coingate, Nowpayments accepted at 50k+ stores
Users need to exercise some amount of caution while investing in meme coins. If a tweet can lead to an astronomical price rise of meme-based crypto, then another tweet or joke by an influential personality can also diminish its value. Investing In memes consists solely of speculative business, where the future and continuing worth of a cryptocurrency is heavily dependent on its social worth. People can make a lot of money from meme coins as long as they remain popular. However, if you invest in a meme coin and the very next day its popularity crashes, you could end up losing fortunes too. The bottom line is, as is the case with all cryptos, you should do ample research before trading in meme coins, particularly the newly launched ones. However, if you want to start investing in Dogecoin, you can do so right away using https://klever.io/ .
Meme tokens have challenges that new investors skip right over. For instance, they tend to have high concentrations of the existing supply stored in a few dozen wallets. That level of centralization makes for a suboptimal investment that is susceptible to manipulation.
Doge and Shib both have unlimited supplies of tokens that can be mined indefinitely. Basic economics teaches that the more of something that’s available, the less valuable it becomes. That’s a big problem facing fiat currencies, which continue to flood markets with new money, and it’s also a problem for meme coins.
Use cases of crypto memes when coupled with underwhelming development roadmaps for the future do not instill confidence in the dog-themed “meme dream team.” Especially when considering breakthrough projects such as Ethereum 2.0, Chainlink, Decentraland, Matic & many others, all of which have varied utilities and solve a variety of problems. Overall there has been a trend of accepting Dogecoin and other crypto coins for merchandise and other goods, payment purposes and people are slowly embracing it.
