Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a crypto meme coin that I see, in my opinion, as on its way to zero. This looks like a straight-up crypto mafia token to me, like a modern-day mafia: putting a dog on a coin, paying a bunch of people to market it and hype it up, and then laughing as they sit back and make a whole bunch of money. I once actually held this coin, because I bought it trying to get views myself. After I bought it, I realized that after eight years in crypto, I needed to step my game up and be a crypto investor who actually did his own research.
Shiba Inu is just an ERC-20 token sitting on Ethereum
The fact about this Shiba Inu is, it's an Ethereum token. It is an ERC-20 token sitting on Ethereum. And the biggest wallets — there are huge amounts of it sitting on exchanges that people can instantly dump and use to manipulate the prices. There is no real utility for this, in my view. Everyone talking about Shiba Inu hitting a dollar — to me that is absolutely beyond any definition of reasonableness or fantasy.
And I'm a guy who talks about real-life magic and miracles. I've done things people think are impossible. I've improved my vision. I got sober, which I thought was impossible 10 years ago. And 20 years ago, the idea of being a professional video gamer seemed like it wasn't even possible — and I did that for real. So I'm a miracles-and-magic kind of person, but Shiba Inu going to a dollar is beyond any of that. There's no possibility in the quantum realm, in my opinion, that that could happen, because it already is a $10 billion market cap.
The market cap doesn't even add up
Now, I'm aware that part of the marketing for this coin was sending almost half the supply to Vitalik, who sent it to a dead address — which to me means this is just another manipulation. It's not really a $10 billion market cap. It's really more like a $5 billion market cap, because that null address is still being counted. Although on Ethereum they actually have got this correct now; they updated the market cap since I realized it. So this is a $10 billion market cap not even counting the burned supply, which is outrageous to me, because this is a meme coin.
Compared to Internet Computer, all Shiba Inu has is marketing
Now you have something like Internet Computer Protocol, which to me is the most advanced crypto and the only third-generation blockchain where you can do computation at scale and put a gigabyte of data on chain. And I'd bet that in 99.9% of scenarios, Internet Computer vastly outperforms Shiba Inu going forward, because Shiba Inu — all it has is marketing. Meme coins generally don't age well, because there's always relentless competition coming up from other companies and other meme coins. The profits on meme coins require you to be in early, but most meme coins are so worthless that most of the ones you try to get in early on are going to be nothing but a loss. These are clearly big crypto mafia manipulations, in my opinion. This isn't the only one I feel this way about — I get into the broader pattern in my view that every crypto except ICP is a meme coin.
In fact, my channel got attacked when I started talking negatively about Shiba Inu. To me, that indicates a strong probability that the people behind these coins have networks of bots — not necessarily this crypto in particular, but the crypto mafia cryptos. They have networks of bots that push videos, push the people promoting the coin, and even attack the people questioning it. So this looks to me like a total ripoff from every scenario.
Almost everyone who bought Shiba Inu — everyone who bought when there was maximum hype — lost money. It did almost nothing for a year and a half, and then there was clearly a manipulated pump. There was some dog-related thing that supposedly contributed to the price going up, but you've already lost most of those gains in just a few months. So to me there's no way this has a good future, because it's so big at a $10 billion market cap, while Internet Computer by comparison is around a $5 billion market cap. In my opinion, Internet Computer is a $500 billion market cap crypto, and Shiba Inu is a forgotten meme coin that is very unlikely to beat its all-time high from the insanity of the last bull market. I seriously doubt we ever go back there. And in case you haven't noticed, the price still has four zeros in front of it.
But when you can make videos saying it's going to go to a dollar, and bots come push your videos... I have no direct proof of that, but I've made videos hyping up lots of different coins, and I notice some of them appear to have bots that push the videos and others don't. My videos have scammer bots that come in and try to rip people off, but I don't get view bots on the videos saying coins are going to zero. I can tell you I get real people watching these videos. If you want to follow more of my honest, real-time crypto reviews, you can watch them in my Money playlist.
You can't even see who's behind Shiba Inu
As proof of how weak the Shiba token is, they've made these other tokens, because there's no good transparency about exactly who's behind it. So under no circumstances would I ever again invest in a crypto where I can't see the faces, the names, and the histories of the people behind the token. With Internet Computer, I can see people's faces and names and forum posts and profiles — I can see who's behind it. But I cannot see who's behind Shiba Inu, and that kind of anonymity, to me, the only reason to be anonymous like that is to protect yourself from people who are going to be really pissed off when their investment goes to zero.
And as more proof of the weakness of Shiba Inu, they launched the BONE token and the LEASH token. That just says to me that the people behind this have calculated that the amount of money they can take from people off the Shiba token is limited, so let's release a BONE token and a LEASH token. But that now also means there are multiple different tokens, and that has split the project like Voldemort splitting his soul in Harry Potter. Now you have these multiple tokens, and you want people to buy them all, which splits up the community and just makes a mess. This is the same thing that turned me off meme coins entirely after I tried trading meme coins and it was horrible.
The holder count is misleading
Now, Shiba Inu does have an impressive number of holders. But this is also misleading, because if you have a small amount of Shiba Inu — say less than twenty or thirty dollars — and you're not on an exchange, which you should never be... but with ERC-20 tokens, people often get stuck on exchanges. Are you going to pay twenty dollars to withdraw your ERC-20 token in fees off an exchange? No. That's why so many Shiba wallets are sitting on crypto exchanges. And this is a bad sign, because crypto to me is about self-custody. If all these people are holding Shiba Inu on exchanges, that means the price can easily be manipulated up or down. We've definitely seen what could be some upward manipulation on some of the exchanges — I have no proof of that, but these exchanges have been charged with lots of crimes, and that's just the ones they've been caught doing. We know some of these exchanges are extremely dishonest, like FTX, doing any kind of thing you can imagine.
And for the people who have a small amount of Shiba Inu, like twenty dollars — even if it 10x'd during a bull run, which to me is unrealistic, but even if it did — you could be looking at paying a hundred dollars in ETH gas fees to sell two hundred dollars of Shiba Inu. So this is not something you can really hold a small amount of. This is something you pretty much have to be a whale to hold.
Now, the distribution of Shiba tokens, if you don't count the top wallet that has 40%, is actually spread out more than a lot of other tokens, because it looks like they did a lot of marketing to pay people to hype it up, talk about it, and say they were holders. That was one of the marketing exploitations they did — sending Vitalik a bunch of it and then saying Vitalik was holding Shiba Inu. That's the kind of dirty marketing that would make sense from a crypto mafia kind of group. But is that the kind of thing you want to be participating in and supporting?
And you'll notice on some days — for example, on Monday, June 10th, there were about 1,399,678 holders on the ERC-20. There were several thousand wallets that dumped all their Shiba Inu in a single day, and then thousands more wallets that dumped all their Shiba Inu the next day. So to me that's moving in exactly the wrong direction, with thousands of people actually dumping the token. Whereas if you compare something like ICP, people are stacking up ICP absolutely constantly. The balance keeps going up. Even when the price dumps, people are stacking, stacking, stacking. You've got forty thousand people with over a hundred ICP now, which is around seventeen or eighteen hundred dollars at the time of filming. So that's going in the right direction, where people are constantly accumulating more and more instead of dumping their holdings.
Why I bought Shiba Inu, and why I'll never do it again
So I bought Shiba Inu. I lost 50% on my Shiba Inu when I bought it, and that hurt my feelings. I'm like, man, I've been in crypto for eight years, I'm making crypto videos, I should be doing better. But I originally bought Shiba Inu to make a video to hype it up, to get myself views and followers and to get the Shiba Inu people to come through and like my videos. And that's the problem with crypto. This is why Shiba Inu has millions of holders: because a bunch of people made videos saying, well, if you had just bought twenty dollars of Shiba Inu back here, look how much money you would have made. Never mind that it's not up there anymore.
But also — why would anybody have bought twenty dollars of some dog meme coin back in 2020, when there was so much better stuff to do, like watch me stream Warzone on Facebook Gaming? There was a lot better stuff to do in 2020. Yes, you would have made money on it, but almost no real person actually bought back then. From some of the videos I've seen getting into how Shiba Inu was created, this was people setting up something and planning to rip people off and getting it into position. Almost no real person actually bought down there. Most of the real people bought near the top and lost their butts. Even me — I maybe lost twenty or forty dollars on this. And I'll tell you, I'll never do that again. If you want to go deeper on how I think about crypto and life, you can join me directly inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
So this is why I think we're going to zero with Shiba Inu — especially when you see one little pump and it instantly drains back almost everything. And this ten-billion-dollar market cap is outrageous to me. You've got thousands of people on some days dumping it. I think Ethereum tokens don't have a very good future.
The one way I'd change my mind
The one way Shiba Inu could go well is if the team moves the token over to Internet Computer Protocol and gets a chain-key version of it. The community is big enough that they could do that. They could try to launch a DAO. If they did that, I might refilm a video and be more positive on it, because I think some of the tokens that do that — especially ones that have big communities like Shiba Inu — could do well. But right now the community is misleading with a token like this. This is a similar conclusion to my honest take when I shared my realistic Toshi price prediction on another dog-and-cat meme coin.
I've talked to some people in person who are holding Shiba Inu, and these are not people I would want to take money advice from. Some of the people I've talked to in person holding Shiba Inu know nothing about it. It's like, "Oh yeah, Jerry, look at this." One of the guys who showed me this was a biker — a pretty tough biker. He knew that I knew about crypto, and he's like, "Yeah, look at the Shiba Inu I'm holding." I told him I would sell that. He's like, "Oh, it's going to go to a dollar." And I'm like, it's not going to go to a dollar. People are lying. I could tell you Internet Computer is going to go to a million dollars, and I think that has a higher likelihood of happening than Shiba Inu going to a dollar — both of them are just as far off from where they are currently. The difference is Internet Computer has real utility and real technology. Shiba Inu was a meme coin, one of now multiple meme coins in the ecosystem.
So do your own research. Make your own decisions. I'm just showing you my research and my decisions — this is my opinion and my experience, not financial advice. The way I see it, you don't have to identify as a Shiba Inu community member. It's a coin you bought on Ethereum, and now that's become part of someone's identity. I'd rather you come hang out with a community that's actually fun to be in, where you can chat with me directly and even schedule a one-on-one call. That's exactly what I built the Jerry Banfield Family for.