Shiba inu started as a joke crypto but who is laughing now?

Bitcoin and all the other major cryptocurrencies plunged overnight but amid the turmoil one coin continued to buck the trend.

In a wash of red in the cryptocurrency market on Thursday morning there was one coin remaining the brightest shade of green.

The dog cryptocurrency shiba inu (SHIB) has continued to smash records in its best ever week where it is up more than 111 per cent and hit a new high just past 6am after rising by 40 per cent overnight.

According to CoinGecko, SHIB hit US$0.00008088 earlier this morning, which is an improvement of 140 million per cent compared to its low last year in November.

While its price might not seem like much, it’s a massive rise since the coin first listed in August 2020 at US$0.000000000972 and comes on a morning where bitcoin and most other major coins fell sharply.

Created in August 2020 by an anonymous person who called themselves “Ryoshi” as a spin-off of dogecoin, SHIB is now rivalling its predecessor for market cap after breaking the $US30 billion barrier.

The coin, which has the Japanese dog as its mascot, is now nipping at the heels of dogecoin, which sits in 10th place among cryptocurrencies for market cap at $US31 billion.

Much of the spike is credited to rumours about the coin being listed on trading platform Robinhood.

Those rumours have ironically seen SHIB reach a bigger market cap than Robinhood — which is at US$30 billion.

Shiba inu’s price in the past 24 hours. Source: CoinGecko

Shiba inu’s price since its launch in August last year. Source: CoinGecko

Coinmomo, a cryptocurrency analysis website, reported over the weekend, without citing any sources, that SHIB would be listed on Robinhood on Monday.

Although the coin did not list on Monday, Robinhood had by then sent a survey to users asking which cryptocurrencies they trade and included shiba inu as an option.

A petition on Change.org imploring Robinhood to list SHIB on its platform has garnered more than 360,000 signatures at time of writing.

Twitter users are bullish about the coin, especially after a few choice words from Robinhood’s CFO on Wednesday, Australian time.

BREAKING NEWS: Robinhood is emailing this survey to select users of their platform.

They are including #SHIB as one of the answers to select!

Clearly doing market research on what their consumers want. pic.twitter.com/ovBNV2p0Wl

— Shiba Inu News (@ShibalnuNews) October 22, 2021

#SHIBARMY is starting to trend. If the Shiba Inu Coin community can get this to a big goal of 5069 retweets then that means they may be strong enough to actually hold this price and I will put $10,000 into $SHIB

— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) October 27, 2021

On Tuesday local time, Wall Street analysts asked Robinhood executives during a conference call whether they were going to list extra cryptocurrencies on its platform.

“We’re hearing from customers that they want more coins,” the company’s CFO Jason Warnick said.

“We’re being, you know, very mindful and diligent in this space. It’s evolving from a regulatory perspective. There’s been a number of questions raised about coins on other platforms being potentially unregistered securities.“

He added: “We think it’s the right thing, not just for shareholders and for the company, but also for customers to make sure that we, you know, apply the same kind of diligence to any new coins. … We do hear our customers and they want more features, and so we’re going to be working, you know, as fast as we can with the right balance of safety and compliance to make sure that we don’t make missteps here.”

Shiba inu is ranked 11th, one behind dogecoin.

In late 2013, US software engineer Billy Markus and Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer created dogecoin as a joke to make fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time.

They used a Japanese dog, a shiba inu, as a mascot for their coin.

Shiba inu is now just two places behind dogecoin on the crypto leaderboard, with doge sitting at number 10.

In just over a year, SHIB has nearly caught up to doge which has been on the market for seven years.

Analysts argue its a sign the market is “overheated”.

“Dog coins are mooning again, which has historically been a pretty good indication of an overheated market,” analysts at Delphi Digital said in a market note published on Monday. “The first time dog coins went wild was April – May this year, and quickly cratered as crypto markets cooled off. In early September, dog coins were all the rage again and the broader crypto market saw a fairly deep de-leveraging.”