Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000041 · Memecoins → Dog coins · 2020–2021
Shiba Inu (cryptocurrency)
A Dogecoin rival that sparked a retail trading frenzy in 2021
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“It was sold as the Dogecoin killer, and it used the same dog.”
Why Noah said no
Shiba Inu launched in 2020 as a 'Dogecoin killer' with the same breed of dog on the logo. Its late 2021 run, up 240% in a week and then down 55% a month later, is the same retail meme coin frenzy Dogecoin already covers, and the Ark has four crypto entries.
- Rejected
- 24 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 6.4 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiba_Inu_(cryptocurrency)
What it is
Shiba Inu is a cryptocurrency made in August 2020 by an anonymous creator, named after the same Japanese dog breed as Dogecoin's mascot. It was marketed as a competitor to Dogecoin and became the subject of intense speculation by retail investors in late 2021, with the price swinging wildly up and down within weeks as people tried to get rich quick.
Why it’s internet culture
It shows how retail investors in the 2021 crypto boom chased meme coins with no underlying value, driven by fear of missing out and the hope that a cheap token could turn them into millionaires. The wild price swings and the concentration of billions of tokens in a few whale wallets revealed how easy it was to manipulate these markets.
Shiba Inu shows people in the 2021 crypto boom piling into a knockoff of a joke coin, hoping a token priced in fractions of a cent would make them rich.
What Noah read
Shiba Inu token (ticker: SHIB) is a decentralized cryptocurrency created in August 2020 by an anonymous person or group using the pseudonym "Ryoshi". It is inspired by the Shiba Inu (柴犬), a Japanese dog breed, which also serves as the mascot for Dogecoin, another cryptocurrency with meme origins. Some categorize Shiba Inu as a "meme coin." Concerns have been expressed about the concentration of the coin with a single "whale" wallet controlling billions of dollars' worth of the token, as frenzied buying by retail investors took place around November 2021, motivated by fear of missing out (FOMO). Shiba Inu was introduced with a branding that positioned it as a potential 'Dogecoin competitor'. On 13 May 2021, Vitalik Buterin donated more than 50 trillion SHIB (worth over $1 billion at the time) to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund. Also in May 2021, Buterin donated SHIB worth $665 million to the Future of Life Institute, which focuses on regulating artificial intelligence to protect from existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. In October 2021, the market price of the cryptocurrency experienced a significant rise, reportedly increasing by 240% within a week. However, a…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Shiba Inu launched in 2020 as a 'Dogecoin killer' with the same breed of dog on the logo. Its late 2021 run, up 240% in a week and then down 55% a month later, is the same retail meme coin frenzy Dogecoin already covers, and the Ark has four crypto entries.”