Shiba Inu could surpass Dogecoin after a 700% SHIB price rally in October

Shiba Inu (SHIB) continued its march upward on Oct. 27, with its price hitting a record high of nearly $0.000060 before correcting lower.

SHIB rallied by more than 25% to an all-time high of $0.00005959, crossing above its previous all-time high of 0.00005000, according to data from Binance. The latest move upside pushed the token’s month-to-date (MTD) returns to approximately 726%, making it the fifth-highest grossing cryptocurrency entering the final quarter of 2021.

SHIB’s October gains had slipped to near 606% following a price correction from its record high, still higher than the rest of the top-cap crypto rivals, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL).

Top five cryptocurrencies ranked according to their October gains. Source: Messari

Still, SHIB’s superior performance particularly stands out against its meme coin rival, Dogecoin (DOGE), whose MTD gains are currently only about 8%. Moreover, Shiba Inu’s market capitalization has now reached $22.1 billion — the 11th-largest — putting it right behind Dogecoin’s $31.53 billion in 10th place.

SHIB copying DOGE bull run?

Shiba Inu was launched in 2020 after taking heavy inspiration from Dogecoin, a 2013-born joke cryptocurrency fashioned after the Japanese dog breed. Eight years since its introduction, Dogecoin’s popularity emerged with its use as payments by sports teams, AMC theaters and as a speculative investment vehicle thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s social media endorsements of the token.

DOGE’s price underwent an incredible upside boom in the first five months of 2021, rising more than 15,000% amid a retail-led frenzy. In doing so, the king meme token reached its record high of $0.76 on May 8, only to correct by over 68% to trade around $0.23 at press time.

DOGE/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView

Overall, Dogecoin went through extreme trends in the previous 12 months, starting with a long period of consolidation, eventually following it up with an extended bullish breakout and further by a massive price correction.

It appears Shiba Inu’s price trends in recent months took cues from Dogecoin’s consolidation and breakout phases, as the SHIB/USDT chart shows below.

SHIB/USDT daily price chart featuring Dogecoin’s three phases. Source: TradingView

A Dogecoin-like 1,500% price boom in the Shiba Inu market puts its long-term profit target near $0.00013500. Nonetheless, the fractal also warns about massive, periodical price corrections toward the 20-day exponential moving average support (the green waves in the charts above) as the price increases.

The overall Shiba Inu dominance in the cryptocurrency market has surged from 0.16% to 0.91% MTD. On the other hand, Dogecoin’s control on the market has reduced from 1.5% to as low as 1.20% in the same period.

SHIB price macro fundamentals

Joe Wiesenthal, editor at Bloomberg Markets, noted that Shiba Inu has “advanced smart-contracting capabilities,” making it better than Dogecoin.

“You can check out Shibaswap, a Uniswap-like decentralized exchange for the SHIB community. It’s got NFT, liquidity mining. All of it. Meanwhile, Dogecoin doesn’t have any of this right now.”

As Cointelegraph covered, the recent SHIB price rally may have also taken cues from the Monday launch of the Shiboshis Social Club. This online community rewards exclusive perks to people who own exclusive Shiba Inu-generated nonfungible tokens (NFT), dubbed Shiboshis.

As a result, retail appears to have been tailing Shiba Inu’s speculative bull run, with a recent study by Bacancy Technology showing that it received 2.8 million Google searches on average in 2021, the third-highest after Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In comparison, search volume of Dogecoin came as the sixth-largest.

Meanwhile, a petition on Change.org pleading with Robinhood to list SHIB tokens on its zero-fee trading app garnered over 500,000 signatures. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said during the company’s earnings call Tuesday that Robinhood is considering adding new coins to the service portfolio, albeit without mentioning their names.

That may have pushed Shiba Inu’s price to its record high Wednesday, further signaling booming retail interest in the meme crypto. 

“Memes have value and have been an investible thesis in 2021,” Jonathan Cheesman, head of over-the-counter and institutional sales at crypto-derivatives exchange FTX, told Bloomberg, adding:

“Lower dollar-price tokens are attractive to retail.”

But according to Ben Caselin, head of research and strategy at crypto exchange AAX, SHIB traders should tread ahead carefully due to excessive speculation, citing prior patterns that indicate that the token would likely “shed much of its value” as it gets challenged by other meme projects.