“Dogecoin Killer” plans to develop a comprehensive crypto ecosystem. But will it be enough for the meme coin to surpass its light-hearted image?
Shiba Inu State
Shiba Inu wants to be more than just a meme, which can be challenging.
After experiencing a parabolic run in the fall of 2021 that saw the SHIB rise over 1,000%, the Ethereum-based meme coin continues to surprise market participants with its persistence in the face of the most severe crypto bear market in history.
While SHIB has achieved its position as a retail investor-backed meme coin, it has maintained its position as the top 20 cryptocurrencies during the market downturn, outperforming many other established projects. The relative strength of the Shiba Inu is partly thanks to its dedicated holder base and online community. Bringing its community to life on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms, the coin has maintained loyal followers of SHIB despite the brutal market conditions.
Additionally, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, which bore the brunt of the recent round of crypto firm liquidations, SHIB has faced relatively few transitions – if any – of companies taking advantage of the token’s exposure.
It has become clear that despite setbacks such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin selling and burning the trillions of SHIB tokens sent to his wallet by the project’s pseudonymous creator Ryoshi, Shiba Inu is here to stay. Over the past year, the project’s developer team has come up with a plan to help Shiba Inu surpass its reputation as a moonlight token and grow into a fully-fledged crypto ecosystem.
SHIBA Ecosystem Expansion
After gaining public attention during the 2021 bull run, the developers of Shiba Inu have taken several initiatives to help what started as a more legitimate project as a simple meme token gain traction.
So far, Shiba Inu’s pseudonymous developers have executed plans to create an Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 chain called Shiberium, a collection of cute NFT avatars known as “THE SHIBOSHIS”, a metaverse, a mobile play-to-earn game, and a Shiba Inu themed stable coin.
While progress is being made at a slow pace. In November 2021, the Shiba Inu’s first NFT collection, The SHIBOSHIS, launched in a whirlwind of hype, escalating Ethereum gas fees as fans raced to sculpt one of the 10,000-pixel art avatars. Most recently, in April, the Shiba Inu team sold 100,000 virtual land plots for the upcoming Shiba Inu Metaverse project.
While details about the Metaverse are sparse, that hasn’t stopped Shiba Inu loyalists from loading up on the virtual land. In a few brief updates on the project from pseudonymous Shiba Inu developer Shytoshi Kusama, “SHIB: The Metaverse”, as it is currently called, will be developed in partnership with a major AAA game studio. However, according to Kusama, several non-disclosure agreements have barred developers from revealing further details.
Other plans, such as developing a Layer 2 Shiberium network, are also moving forward. Blockchain development company Unification has been tasked with building the new network, which will form the base layer for the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Kusama’s blog post says that the network will be “optimized for gaming” and will offer lower fees and higher throughput than Ethereum.
According to a recent blog post by Unification Product Lead Maziar Sadri, Shiberium will launch its public beta later this year, allowing independent developers and users to fully interact with the network and participate in its verification process. Once fully launched, the SHIB token and all Shiba Inu-related NFTs will be migrated to Shiberium, and future ecosystem developments will launch directly on the new Layer 2 network.
However, the planned mobile play-to-earn game may have Shiba Inu fans most excited. Announced in November 2021 at the height of the Shiba Inu frenzy, development of the yet-to-be-named game is led by gaming industry veteran William Volk with over 25 years of experience at top-tier companies such as Activision and ROKiT Games.
Like SHIB: The Metaverse, very little is known about Shiba Inu games beyond Volk’s involvement. Volk’s latest update came three months ago when he posted an invite to an in-person meetup on Twitter along with teaser screenshots of art from the upcoming game.
Elsewhere, several of Kusama’s tweets and blog posts have dropped a few more breadcrumbs of information. The game will be a collectible card game similar to Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. More recent updates indicate that Volk-led Shiba Inu Games and Australian studio PlaySide are both involved in the game’s development.
Although the play-to-earn aspect of the Shiba Inu game has yet to be revealed, several clues point to how it might work. In Kusama’s July 6 blog post, he revealed that players will be able to earn a new token called Treat through the game upon release. Kusama also indicated that many of the token synapses for the treat will be woven into the Shiba Inu ecosystem. He wrote that the treat will “receive rewards for the metaverse” and “help to provide balance,” the Shiba Inu stable coin employed. However, like most of Kusama’s post, he did not give any concrete details on the token ecosystem, other than that TREAT would “benefit the current SHIB ecosystem holders greatly” and that the token “won’t disappoint.”
Can a Shiba Inu become more than a meme?
Although the developers of Shiba Inu are dedicated to develop the token into a fully fledged crypto ecosystem, several factors may be preventing them from achieving their vision.
While Shiberium and the collectible card game have sparked excitement within the Shiba Inu community, concrete details on what is being built and how it will work are best left out. Information is often spread across multiple sources, with no centralized hub of all the latest announcements.
Most of the information has come from Kusama after Rayoshi stepped down from the project earlier this year. Kusama’s posts are often casual, lack structure, and make bold claims about the Shiba Inu ecosystem and its upcoming plans without providing specific details. As a result, Shiba Inu fans continue to speculate about the details of the much-anticipated update, causing confusion and causing fear, uncertainty and doubt from opponents of the project.
For example, Kusama has stated that Shiberium Layer 2 will not require ETH for its transaction fees and will use the Shiba Inu ecosystem governance token Bone to process transactions. However, according to the Shiba Inu whitepaper, Bone has a limited supply of 250 million tokens. It is currently distributed only to those who participate in various staking and liquidity-providing activities on the official Shiba Inu decentralized exchange Shiba Swap. Kusama’s post has yet to reveal further details about how both Bone Gas and the governance token will function, enabling holders to do due diligence on how the token system will function after the launch of Shiberium. Instead of being, giving up hope for the best.
Questionable tokens aside, another concern is that many of the Shiba Inu ecosystem initiatives are copies of ideas previously put forward by other crypto projects. The Shiba Inu’s Metaverse offering will be in direct competition with those developed by well-funded companies like Bored Ape Yacht Club maker Yuga Labs and Facebook owner Meta. Several smaller NFT projects have also tried to copy the Metaverse playbook into their roadmaps, which has exhausted the concept even before a single Web3-native Metaverse game has successfully launched.
Crypto gaming is also experiencing a sharp slowdown from titles like Axie Infinity and STEPN, two popular games that experienced dramatic growth but failed to create a self-sustaining token ecosystem. The current play-to-earn model, which the Shiba Inu’s play-to-earn game is not yet isolated from itself, requires a constant influx of new players to keep existing players interested in playing and is therefore unstable. It’s unclear whether the Shiba Inu collectible card game will be able to overcome this issue when it launches. Still, with so little information to work with, it is proving difficult for crypto enthusiasts to leave behind a project with so many unknown factors.
Finally, in light of the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its algorithmic UST stablecoin, the idea of a native stablecoin will most likely appeal to the wider crypto community. No information has been released explaining how the stablecoin will function or whether it will be overcollateralised. However, the little information is not encouraging as to the role of the Treat Reward token in the peg mechanism of the stablecoin.
The big question is whether the Shiba Inu community is interested in stable coins, complex token systems, and yield generating opportunities. The early success of the Shiba Inu relied on its memorizing power and passionate community. From an outsider’s perspective, a game that prioritizes player engagement, community, and fun over profit-making potential may be more on-brand for the Shiba Inu, especially when the cryptocurrency got caught in a bear market. Are.
However, it is hard to deny that the Shiba Inu is establishing itself as a serious cryptocurrency competitor. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and it’s only a matter of time before the finished product hits the market. Still, if the project’s developers don’t consider what the project’s community wants, what was once one of the biggest drivers of crypto adoption may become a forgotten meme of the past.
