How to Buy SHIBA INU (SHIB)
Beginner’s Guide
What Is SHIBA INU (SHIB)?
SHIBA INU (SHIB) is a cryptocurrency that was created in August 2020 by an anonymous individual or group known as “Ryoshi.” It is a decentralized cryptocurrency that operates on the Ethereum blockchain and is modeled after another popular cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
SHIBA INU is designed to be a meme-based cryptocurrency that represents the Shiba Inu dog breed, which is also the mascot of Dogecoin. The SHIB token has gained popularity due to its low price and its association with the Dogecoin community. The SHIB community is known for its humor and light-hearted approach to investing.
SHIBA INU operates on a deflationary tokenomics model, where the total supply of SHIB tokens decreases over time due to burning mechanisms. The token has also recently launched its own decentralized exchange, ShibaSwap, which allows users to trade various cryptocurrencies and earn rewards in SHIB.
It’s important to note that SHIBA INU is a high-risk investment due to its speculative nature and lack of a clear use case. As with any cryptocurrency investment, investors should do their own research and consider the potential risks before investing in SHIB.
How to Buy SHIBA INU Summary
- Get a SHIBA INU wallet (e.g. Ledger, Trezor , Exodus, Guarda, AtomicWallet)
- Find an exchange that sells SHIBA INU (e.g. Crypto.com, Binance , Coinbase , Bitfinex , Kucoin)
- Deposit money and make the trade
- Withdraw the SHIBA INU to your wallet
Buying SHIBA INU in 3 Simple Steps
Step 1 – Get a SHIB wallet
SHIBA INU Hardware Wallets
SHIBA INU (SHIB) is an ERC-20 token that operates on the Ethereum blockchain, which means it can be stored on any wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens. Here are some popular hardware wallets that can be used to store SHIB:
Ledger Nano S: The Ledger Nano S is a popular hardware wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB. It’s a USB device that provides secure storage for your private keys and allows you to manage your cryptocurrency assets offline.
Ledger Nano X: The Ledger Nano X is a newer version of the Ledger Nano S that offers more advanced features and Bluetooth connectivity. It also supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB.
Trezor One: The Trezor One is another popular hardware wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB. It provides secure storage for your private keys and allows you to manage your cryptocurrency assets offline.
Trezor Model T: The Trezor Model T is a newer version of the Trezor One that offers a larger touch screen and more advanced features. It also supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB.
It’s important to note that hardware wallets are considered one of the safest ways to store cryptocurrency, as they keep your private keys offline and out of reach of potential hackers.
The best option for storing any cryptocurrency would be to use a hardware wallet. These are pieces of hardware that store the private key to your coins offline.
Today, there are two leading hardware manufacturers to choose from – Ledger and TREZOR. Both companies have different models of hardware wallets that will get the job done.
If you want deeper insights on specific models, you can read my Ledger Nano X review or my TREZOR Model T review.
SHIBA INU Software Wallets
SHIBA INU (SHIB) is an ERC-20 token that operates on the Ethereum blockchain, which means it can be stored on any wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens. Here are some popular software wallets that can be used to store SHIB:
MyEtherWallet: MyEtherWallet (MEW) is a popular web-based wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB. It allows you to create a new wallet or access an existing one, and provides a user-friendly interface for managing your cryptocurrency assets.
Trust Wallet: Trust Wallet is a mobile wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices, and provides secure storage for your private keys.
MetaMask: MetaMask is a browser extension that allows you to manage your Ethereum assets, including ERC-20 tokens like SHIB. It’s available for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Brave browsers, and provides a simple and secure way to interact with the Ethereum blockchain.
Exodus: Exodus is a desktop and mobile wallet that supports multiple cryptocurrencies, including SHIB. It provides a user-friendly interface and allows you to manage your cryptocurrency assets in one place.
It’s important to note that software wallets are considered less secure than hardware wallets, as they are vulnerable to potential hacks and malware attacks. It’s recommended to only use software wallets for small amounts of cryptocurrency and to always keep your private keys secure.
Hardware wallets cost money, so if you’re not sure how serious you are about cryptocurrencies and just want to get a taste of what they feel like, perhaps you would be better off starting with a software wallet.
A software wallet is a free program that lets you store your coins on your computer or mobile phone.
The easiest SHIBA INU coin software wallets to get started with are undoubtedly Exodus, AtomicWallet and Guarda . All wallets are very intuitive. Exodus, Atomic Wallet and Guarda is available on desktop for Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as on mobile for both iOS and Android. If you want more information you can read my Exodus, AtomicWallet and Guarda review.
Step 2 – Find an SHIBA INU (SHIB) Exchange
Buy SHIBA INU through Crypto.com
- Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore. As of May 2022, the company reportedly had 50 million customers and 4,000 employees. The exchange issues a token, Cronos. The company was initially founded in Hong Kong by Bobby Bao, Gary Or, Kris Marszalek, and Rafael Melo in 2016 as “Monaco”. In 2018, the company was renamed as Crypto.com following a purchase of a domain owned by cryptography researcher and professor Matt Blaze. Domain sellers valued the domain at US$5–10 million.
Buy SHIBA INU through Binance
- Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange which is the largest exchange in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. It was founded in 2017 and is registered in the Cayman Islands. Binance was founded by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high frequency trading software.
Buy SHIBA INU through Coinbase
- Coinbase is a convenient and cheap way to buy Ethereum and the platform is open to 200+ countries). Coinbase will sell you CRO for a variable fee that depends on your payment method (credit cards have a higher fee than wire transfers), order size and market volatility. Here’s how you buy Ethereum on Coinbase: Open a Coinbase account Add your payment method (Credit card or bank account) Go to “Buy/Sell” and select the amount of Ethereum you desire Click “Buy Cronos”
Buy SHIBA INU through Bitfinex
- Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc registered in the British Virgin Islands.Their customers’ money has been stolen or lost in several incidents, and they have been unable to secure normal banking relationships. Bitfinex was founded in December 2012 as a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, offering digital asset trading services to users around the world. Bitfinex initially started as a P2P margin lending platform for Bitcoin and later added support for more cryptocurrencies.
Buy SHIBA INU through Kucoin
- Kucoin is a global cryptocurrency exchange for numerous digital assets and cryptocurrencies. Launched in September 2017, KuCoin has grown into one of the most popular crypto exchanges and already has over 8 million registered users from 700+ countries and regions. According to Alexa traffic ranking, KuCoin’s monthly unique ranking is in the top 5 globally. Known as the “People’s Exchange”, KuCoin operates in Seychelles, providing users with multi-language and 24/7 customer service. Meanwhile, KuCoin has established local communities all over the world in South Korea, Japan, Spain, Italy, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, India, and other regions, providing users with the most local services. Currently, 1 out of every 4 crypto holders in the world is with KuCoin.
Step 3 – Withdraw Your SHIBA INU (SHIB)
Once you decide on an exchange, open an account and buy your SHIBA INU. Make sure to withdraw the SHIBA INU from the exchange to your personal wallet.
Never leave coins on an exchange, as you risk losing them all if that exchange gets hacked or shuts down (which has happened in the past) and always double check address before send coins because you can send the coins to wrong address .
OVERVIEW
Who Are the Founders of SHIBA INU?
The identity of the founder or founders of SHIBA INU (SHIB) is unknown, as they go by the pseudonym “Ryoshi”. According to the SHIBA INU whitepaper, the project was created by a “decentralized community experiment” that was inspired by the success of Dogecoin.
The project started as a joke and was designed to be a meme-based cryptocurrency that represents the Shiba Inu dog breed, which is also the mascot of Dogecoin. The SHIB community has grown rapidly and has become known for its humor and light-hearted approach to investing.
It’s important to note that the anonymous nature of the SHIBA INU team has raised some concerns among investors, as it can be difficult to assess the legitimacy and long-term prospects of a project without knowing who is behind it. Investors should do their own research and consider the potential risks before investing in SHIB.
What Makes SHIBA INU Unique?
The SHIBA INU website invites dog-inspired artists from all over the world to foster the “artistic Shiba movement” as they bring their SHIBA INU community into the NFT market. SHIBA INU has also created a campaign using Amazon Smile in order to collect donations to escue real, live Shiba Inu dogs with the Shiba Inu Rescue Association.
After initially being only one meme coin of many, Shiba Inu skyrocketed to popularity after Vitalik Buterin famously burned his share of the SHIB supply. Ryoshi had given Buterin 50% of the SHIB supply, announcing that “as long as Vitalik doesn’t rug us,” Shiba Inu would be fine.
However, Buterin decided to burn 90% of his share, which later would have been worth billions thanks to the soaring value of SHIB. The remaining 10% were sent to a charity, as were about 50 trillion SHIB more that Vitalik had donated to a COVID-19 relief fund. He stated that he did not want “to be a locus of power” and thus gave the tokens away. This resulted in a temporary loss of value for SHIB, which the token later recovered from after the community agreed on an arrangement with the charity in question.
Ryoshi’s goal for Shiba Inu has been to see if a perpetual decentralized organization could work with no central leadership. In a blog post, Royshi noted that the rift caused by Buterin’s token donation made the community stronger and would enable it to distribute further and decentralize the movement. His vision for the core ecosystem is to perform its utility while the Shiba Inu-own stablecoin becomes the globalized exchange of value.
In October 2021, SHIB surged on the news of a possible Robinhood listing and briefly flipped Dogecoin to become the most-valued meme coin by market capitalization. Thus far, Robinhood has not listed SHIB, despite a petition with over 500,000 signatures calling for it. Robinhood executive Christine Brown has lauded the efforts of the Shiba Inu community, saying that one of her favorite things was seeing it engage with the community to make its wishes heard. However, Robinhood would prioritize safety over the “short-term gain” of a new token listing and has left Shiba Inu fans waiting since.
The October 2021 price surge famously minted a billionaire, as one wallet was uncovered that had bought $8,000 worth of SHIB in summer 2020, which was worth over $5.7 billion at SHIB’s all-time high valuation. The wallet owner has not been determined, although the person appears to have sent parts of their fortune to other wallets several weeks after the price explosion.
The price surge also led to increased adoption across token holders. WhaleStats compiled data of the largest ETH wallets and found that SHIB represents over 20% of the combined market shares of all ERC-20 tokens held by Ethereum whales. CRO was a distant second with only 5%. SHIB also surpassed the one-million holder mark following its all-time high.
Moreover, retailers increasingly started adopting SHIB as a means of payment following its popularity among small-time investors. American electronics retailer Newegg added SHIB at the start of December 2021, partnering with crypto payments platform BitPay to unlock payments in SHIB. This followed the adoption of SHIB by over 500 merchants, according to payments firm CoinGate, with even Samsung-backed digital wallet provider ZenGo adding SHIB to its options and a restaurant in Paris accepting it as a payment option. At one point, the Shiba Inu community called for McDonald’s to accept Shiba Inu, although the social media effort eventually fell short.
A major reason for the surging price of SHIB was a continued effort by the SHIB community to build a utility for the Shiba Inu token and the subsequent emergence of an entire Shiba Inu ecosystem.
ShibaSwap is the coin’s designated DEX that started as a fork of Sushiswap that has, in the words of Ryoshi, its “own little twists and elements.” Furthermore, Shiba Inu also plans to develop SHI, which will be the “global exchange of value for plebs,” an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to one cent instead of one dollar as most other stablecoins. Its launch is planned after the Shiba layer-two solution called Shibarium, and Ryoshi envisions SHI to work in a similar way to DAI. That way, SHI would have collateral as a backstop that would push it back to one cent if the peg was lost.
According to Ryoshi, the end goal is that SHI becomes a global stable currency “that plebs across all countries are able to use as both a store of value and method of payment.”
In addition to SHI, a financial ecosystem is planned, and SHI would be added as a weighted pool pair on Curve. In that case, Ryoshi expects forks of the major DeFi protocols to appear in the Shiba Inu ecosystem, which would require an immutable bridge to function.
Shiba would also start hosting localized meetups and a once-a-year ShibaCon convention that would be hosted at an easily accessible location in a country without oppressive visa restrictions “for the sake of inclusiveness for global plebs.”
One immediate change Shiba Inu has implemented is increasing token burns, which have sparked renewed interest in the token at the beginning of 2022. Bigger Entertainment, a crypto record label selling merch, NFTs and concert tickets, organized a SHIB burn party that burned over 239 million SHIB over Christmas. In total, the team has burned almost one billion SHIB since the end of October.
SHIB: The Metaverse and Shibarium
While looking to expand the utility of SHIB, the development team introduced a metaverse — a virtual reality project powered by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Here, users can mint parcels of digital lands using ETH or its equivalent amount in SHIB tokens. Interestingly, other Shiba Inu-related tokens – BONE and LEASH – will also play various roles as different phases of the metaverse come to life.
According to the team, the goal is to create a fun, immersive and interactive environment where users can explore, earn passive income and collect in-game resources. Importantly, the metaverse will allow users to develop and launch their own projects. In total, there are 100,595 plots of land on SHIB: The Metaverse. Of the total, 36,431 digital lands were unlocked on April 13, 2022 – the launch date of the introductory phase of the metaverse.
Like most existing metaverses, the parcels of lands found on SHIB: The Metaverse are categorized based on the desirability of their locations. Naturally, lands in strategic areas are valued higher than the rest. The four tiers of lands on Shiba’s metaverse are as follows:
- Tier 4: Silver Fur: 17,030 Lands
- Tier 3: Gold Tail: 7,356 Lands
- Tier 2: Platinum Paw: 5,714 Lands
- Tier 1: Diamond Teeth: 2,024 Lands
Below were the launch prices of the tiers listed above:
- 0.2 $ETH for (Tier 4) Silver Fur
- 0.3 $ETH for (Tier 3) Gold Tail
- 0.5 $ETH for (Tier 2) Platinum Paw
- 1 $ETH for (Tier 1) Diamond Teeth
Originally, the plan was to allow the use of ETH alone to mint unlocked lands. However, the team later decided to add the SHIB token as a minting currency, thereby expanding the utility of the token.
Although users have begun to purchase SHIB lands, the SHIB metaverse will not officially launch until Shibarium, an upcoming layer 2 scaling network that will eventually house the entire Shiba ecosystem, is deployed. The plan is to have a layer 2 ecosystem built on top of Ethereum’s layer 1 network to meet the computational and memory demands for running the fast-expanding Shiba ecosystem. Apart from hosting the SHIB metaverse on Shibarium, the team is also looking to deploy a stablecoin, called SHI, on the layer 2 solution.
Another notable development that coincided with the introduction of SHIB: The Metaverse was the launch of a new website where future developments and expansions, including the launch of the metaverse, will take place.
How Many SHIBA INU (SHIB) Coins Are There in Circulation?
The SHIBA INU website notes that they locked 50% of the total token supply on Uniswap, and “threw away the keys!” The remaining 50% was “burned to Vitalik Buterin.” In response to the “gift” from the Shiba Inu team, Vitalik Buterin sent 50 trillion SHIB tokens, worth $1 billion in Shiba Inu price at that time, to India’s Covid Crypto Relief Fund. Buterin then burned 40% of the total supply to a dead wallet.
There are several other tokens described on the SHIBA INU website — LEASH, which has “been unleashed and will not rebase,” and BONE, the “Dogecoin Killer.” LEASH has a fixed supply of only 107,646 tokens, and offers enticing rewards to liquidity providers, while BONE has 250,000,000 tokens, and is a governance token that allows holders to vote on the Shiba Inu’s Doggy decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
The WoofPaper notes that you will use SHIB to DIG for BONES or ShibaSwap, or even BURY your tokens. “Trainers” can teach their Shibas to SWAP tokens as well — all of these actions create “Returns” that are put into the Puppy Pools, where the #SHIBARMY has the option of BURYING or DIGGING for BONES.
At the beginning of May 2021, dog-themed meme tokens like Shiba Inu saw transaction volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Shiba Inu price hit an all-time high (ATH) of 0.00005 on May 10, 2021, before going on a downtrend since.
As mentioned above, on May 13, Vitalik Buterin (who was given half of the token supply by the developers) announced that he was donating a large amount of these tokens to a fund helping India with COVID relief. The SHIBA developers had not anticipated Buterin selling his tokens, but eventually, the two parties came to a mutually satisfying agreement. Later, the fund actually lamented having sold its tokens too early, as its share would have been worth well over $1 billion at the token’s all-time high.
Despite rumors alleging the contrary, Elon Musk does not own any SHIB. He confirmed as much in a tweet, which caused a temporary price drop.
How Is the SHIBA INU Network Secured?
According to 22-page-long SHIB’s WoofPaper, SHIB is an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum, a proof-of-work blockchain currently transitioning to proof-of-stake.
Ryoshi announced in his final blog post to date that Shiba Inu would develop its own layer-two solution that would be more decentralized than Polygon or BSC, both of which Ryoshi regards as not truly decentralized. The Shiba L2 would be called “Shibarium” and is supposed to use BONE as its primary pair token, as written above.
According to Ryoshi, Shibarium would be built by a “very competent blockchain team” with experience building such solutions. Developer Eric M has announced in the Shiba Inu Discord server that Shibarium would launch “soon,” although he did not specify a date.
Where Can You Buy Shiba Inu ?
SHIBA INU (SHIB) can be purchased on a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges. Here are some popular exchanges where you can buy SHIB:
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Binance: Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and supports the trading of SHIB. You can buy SHIB with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB), and other cryptocurrencies.
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Crypto.com: Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider that supports the trading of SHIB. You can buy SHIB with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
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KuCoin: KuCoin is a cryptocurrency exchange that supports the trading of SHIB. You can buy SHIB with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
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Bitrue: Bitrue is a cryptocurrency exchange that supports the trading of SHIB. You can buy SHIB with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
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Uniswap: Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that operates on the Ethereum blockchain and allows you to trade ERC-20 tokens, including SHIB. You can buy SHIB with Ethereum on Uniswap.
It’s important to note that the availability of SHIB may vary by exchange, and the price of SHIB can be highly volatile. It’s recommended to do your own research and consider the potential risks before investing in SHIB or any other cryptocurrency.