Dogecoin rival Shiba Inu (SHIB) has surpassed Binance USD (BUSD) in market capitalization, moving into the 14th spot on CoinGecko's rankings. It currently has a market cap of $6.8 billion as of Apr. 16.
Binance's stablecoin has been losing its market share following an order from New York state's financial regulator for Paxos to stop issuing BUSD.
Shiba Inu's next target is Litecoin (LTC), the silver to Bitcoin's gold. The OG altcoin currently holds the 13th position with a market cap of $6.9 billion.
The gap between SHIB and LTC has narrowed significantly. The meme coin's recent growth can be attributed to several factors. Among these is the upcoming launch of the Shiba Inu Metaverse, a project that aims to expand the utility of the Shiba Inu ecosystem, slated to open by December this year.
The meme coin's developers are confident that users will have the opportunity to explore some of the areas in the Metaverse by the end of 2023.However, they also note that not all areas of the Metaverse will be fully completed, as it is an ongoing project. This development has likely contributed to the increased interest and investment in SHIB tokens.
Moreover, there is a lot of chatter surrounding the upcoming launch of the mainnet version of the Shibarium layer-2 solution.
As Shiba Inu continues to gain momentum, it will be interesting to see if the meme coin can surpass Litecoin and continue its climb up the market cap rankings.