Deciphering why Shiba Inu [SHIB] was left out of the recent meme craze

• Unlike several trending memes, SHIB transactions from new addresses were almost absent.
• The social volume recovered but was not enough to buy back holders’ loyalty.

With many meme coins riding the wave of glaring hype, already-established tokens like Shiba Inu [SHIB] may have missed out on the season. Needless to say, the ongoing rally of numerous meme-inspired tokens over the last few weeks has shifted attention from the cryptocurrency which was the frenzy king of 2021.

Realistic or not, here’s SHIB’s market cap in PEPE’s terms

SHIB: A token absent from the group

Firstly, the meme coin market is highly volatile and usually driven by hype, an increase in traction, and active participation. Interestingly, these were the driving factors of trending assets like Pepe [PEPE] which recently broke the $1 billion market cap, and hit an ATH.

Although interest in meme coins tends to be short-lived, Shiba Inu and Dogecoin [DOGE] seems to have broken the myth. However, there were several reasons to suggest that SHIB has been disqualified from competing this season.

As mentioned earlier, user adoption is paramount to hiking the price of a meme. But for SHIB, it has not been the case. As a matter of fact, the Shiba Inu ecosystem was struggling with embracing new addresses as indicated by the network growth.

As of this writing, the network growth decreased to 395. This fall implies that the daily level of interaction and first-time transactions was nothing to be elated about. 

Source: Santiment

Subsequently, the social volume seemed to have made up for the decline in the metric discussed above. A look at Santiment’s data showed that the SHIB social volume increased from the plummet in April. 

Social volume estimates the number of unique text documents on several social media platforms. This hike ensured that the metric rose to 2,700 on 6 May. 

No prime time to date

Nonetheless, the boost in hype has not been able to positively affect the SHIB price. According to CoinMarketCap, the token value shrunk 8.23% of its value in the last seven days. 

Following the rise of other memes, the total number of SHIB holders decreased from 1.32 million on 27 March. While it was able to recover to 1.29 million, the trend suggested that some holders sold.

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Meanwhile, the supply on exchanges remained somewhat flat around the same period. Thus, a situation like this could indicate that a large part of the market was focused on keeping the new memes with potential for the long term rather than SHIB.

Source: Santiment

Considering the on-chain SHIB condition, it could be safe to say that the time for the token to shine was not yet here. Besides PEPE, the token might also face competition from Floki Inu [FLOKI], which recently got a Binance listing.