In mid-March, Tesla CEO Musk tweeted that he would raise a Shiba Inu at his home. CoinGecko data shows that within a few hours after Musk tweeted, the price of SHIB (Shiba Inucoin) rose by 300%, and SHIB caused heated discussions for a while.
After more than a month, SHIB did not leave like many "earth dog" projects. The community is still developing very rapidly. It is expected that ShibaSwap will be launched at the end of April. Yesterday, pictures of Vitalik and the SHIB team together appeared on the Internet, causing another wave of heated discussions in the market.
This article does not intend to focus on the development of the project itself, but wants to talk more about the interesting design and community phenomenon behind SHIB.
An interesting community practice
According to the official introduction, SHIB is an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building. The total amount of SHIB issued is 1000 trillion, of which 50% of the total supply has been placed in Uniswap, and the private key has been lost, and the remaining 50% has been transferred to the Vitalik address. This means that users can freely buy and sell in Uniswap. Losing the private key means giving up management rights. Because the price of SHIB is very low, some users hold billions or even trillions of SHIB coins.
The innovation of SHIB is to make the distribution of tokens based on PoS and other mechanisms complete a completely decentralized attempt.
Most blockchain projects were based on the PoW mechanism in the early days, just like Bitcoin, everyone can mine, and this kind of token distribution is completely decentralized; but with the emergence of the PoS mechanism, blockchain projects The distribution of tokens began to have certain characteristics of centralization. For projects based on mechanisms such as PoS, a part of the tokens is generally reserved for the team and the foundation. The reserved part for the team is mainly used to motivate the team to develop, and the reserved part for the foundation is mainly used for ecological construction. In practice, the two The investors are almost a group of people, and the drawbacks of centralization are very serious.
This practice of the Shiba Inu community makes it necessary for everyone to buy in the open market, so that developers cannot dump their team tokens in the community, thus ensuring fairness and complete decentralization. As for the tokens transferred to V God’s address, if V God also participates in the project development in the end, these 50% of the tokens may act as an ecological fund.
SHIB is also known as DOGECOIN KILLER (Dogecoin Killer). From the perspective of the token mechanism, unlike Dogecoin, SHIB has an upper limit of issuance and a destruction mechanism. SHIB is issued based on Ethereum and will be launched on ShibaSwap at the end of April. Compared with Dogecoin, which can only be used for Twitter, Reddit rewards and other application scenarios, SHIB can be better applied to the blockchain ecosystem of Ethereum. However, SHIB has been launched for a short period of time, and the circulation is not sufficient, and it still needs time to test.
The trend of decentralized community development behind SHIB
The popularity of SHIB is undoubtedly directly related to Musk’s tweet. Musk had previously praised SHIB and bought SHIB. This will naturally attract a lot of attention.
In addition, the reason why SHIB’s popularity can continue also reflects the serious phenomenon of retail investors in the current encryption market. Many people who enter the encryption market in 2021 have FOMO emotions, anxiety about "fear of heights" about currency prices, and worries about "taking over the market with leeks". Not long after SHIB was born, you can have tens of millions if you buy a few hundred with just pocket money, plus the fluke mentality of "if it rises to 0.01 in a few years, you will be financially free", which jointly promote the development and development of SHIB. circulation.
Further exploration, the emergence of tokens such as SHIB is also a trend product of community-based movements. On January 23, the stock price of GameStop in the US stock market was around US$40, and then soared all the way, and by January 28 it had risen to US$469. It can be said that American retail investors have taught a wave of capitalists a lesson and rubbed Wall Street elites on the ground. Behind this force, the WallStreetBets community on the Reddit forum has contributed a lot. On January 29, it was reported that Robinhood, the most popular stock trading platform for retail investors in the United States, had closed the stock trading of Game Station (GME). The affected stock trading of MC Cinemas (AMC) and Nokia (NOK) was also "unplugged".
The soaring stock price of GameStop can be said to be the first large-scale community-based movement in the financial market. This phenomenon is related to the chaos and difficulties in the world today, such as the stagnation of world economic growth, the wide gap between the rich and the poor, and the central bank’s monetary policy. Disappointment and the pursuit of decentralization, etc. In the traditional financial market, the power of retail investors is weak after all. With the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), the encryption market has attracted more and more attention.
On April 16, DOGE skyrocketed by up to 200% in a single day and tripled in two days. This is a very familiar taste. Behind Dogecoin, we can indeed see a group of community forces that support decentralization and anti-elitistization, including: Elon Musk, Carole Baskin, Mark Cuban, Genne Simmons, Snoop Dogg and other celebrities, as well as Wall Street Bets , SatoshiStreetBets and other organizations. Speaking of SHIB, in fact, its rise, as the official said: SHIB is an experiment of decentralized spontaneous community construction. What this article wants to say is that behind this community-based experiment, it represents the rise and development trend of a decentralized community power, and SHIB is still just the beginning.
