Dogecoin Killer ?

The Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency that’s now worth serious money, confronted the threat posed by Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live this past weekend, and now it may be facing a challenge from an upstart puppy-themed competitor.

The Shiba Inu coin, launched less than a year ago and named after the dog breed, is a cryptocurrency that trades as SHIB and champions itself as the “Dogecoin killer.” A single SHIB coin is nearly worthless—less than $0.000029 as of Wednesday—but its trading surged this week after it was added to cryptocurrency trading platforms OKEx and Binance. Chinese traders have helped propel SHIB’s rise, with the Chinese-founded exchange Huobi, which is popular among Chinese traders, handling the largest share of SHIB’s trading volume in recent days.

SHIB’s 24-hour trading volume is over $8 billion, and it has a market capitalization of over $11 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Before SHIB was added to the trading platforms this week, its trading volume maxed out at just over $500 million in a single day, and as recently as January its daily trading volume was lower than $1.

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For now, SHIB may be a “meme coin” and have little to no underlying value or use cases. But experts say that its popularity should not be ignored since it reflects the behaviors of a new, growing class of cryptocurrency traders.

“Rather than simply dismissing the hype outright, it’s important to realize that what we’re seeing is the mass movement of traders new to crypto moving into the space,” says Ben Caselin, head of research and strategy at cryptocurrency exchange AAX.