The Shiba Inu team has made it explicitly clear that the "experiment will continue" on the cusp of the sixth anniversary of the token's launch.
This comes after the price of the embattled meme coin soared by roughly 20% within just a week, becoming one of the best-performing tokens within the top 30.
Still, the price of SHIB is down roughly 95% from its record peak that was reached over four years ago back in October 2021.
How the experiment started
SHIB was launched on August 1, 2020, by the anonymous developer known as Ryoshi. It was introduced as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum.
The famous memecoin was launched by simply minting 1 quadrillion SHIB tokens and setting up a liquidity pool on Uniswap.
Notably, half of the token's supply was sent to Vitalik Buterin, the legendary creator of the Ethereum cryptocurrency. Sending such a large portion of tokens to Buterin was meant to show that there was a sufficient level of decentralization.
The token would remain under the radar for months before finally making some of its first headlines.
The memecoin started attracting some minor attention during the first months of 2021 before climbing higher. In May 2021, SHIB finally broke into the crypto mainstream after Buterin burned 41% of the supply while donating 50 trillion tokens. The little-known memecoin was suddenly on everyone's lips.
SHIB reached its greatest prominence later that year. During the broader cryptocurrency bull market of October 2021, the cryptocurrency experienced a massive rally, even briefly surpassing Dogecoin (DOGE) by market cap, and a relentless rally that caught many naysayers off-guard.
The token's momentum started to weaken, and it ended up underperforming for more than four years.
SHIB has been plagued by its enormous token supply, the apparent lack of real-world utility, as well as the saturation of the memecoin market.
Dan Burgin
U.Today Editorial Team
