During the meme mania of 2020-21, Shiba Inu (Shep -0.97%) It has captured the imagination of cryptocurrency investors by offering a potential path to millionaire status. Indeed, there are some cryptocurrency investors who have become incredibly wealthy by investing in the meme coin. But the Shiba Inu is now down 90% since 2021, and several efforts to boost the token's price over the past two years have not worked as planned.
While things don't look promising at the moment, there are still several possible scenarios for a Shiba Inu to become a millionaire cryptocurrency miner. I'm not saying that these scenarios are likely, just that they represent potential paths to success. Let's take a closer look, and then you can be the judge of how likely it is.
Scenario #1: Reduce the supply of coins for the Shiba Inu
The first scenario involves the Shiba Inu's coin supply, which is still ridiculously large at 589 trillion coins. To put this number into perspective, the total lifetime supply of Bitcoin (Crypto: Bitcoin) The limit is only 21 million coins. In my opinion, the only way to boost the price of the Shiba Inu is to reduce the supply of coins to less than a trillion coins.
The way to do this is by burning coins, which is simply the process of transferring the coin to a “dead” (i.e. non-functioning) crypto wallet. When you burn a coin, you remove it from the overall coin supply in circulation, and this (in theory) should help boost the price of the cryptocurrency. With this in mind, the Shiba Inu has launched a number of high-profile coin-burning campaigns.
But here's the thing – even if the Shiba Inu burned a trillion coins a year, it would take 589 years for the coin supply to reach less than 1 trillion! While there are some scenarios as to how the Shiba Inu could burn nearly 10 trillion coins per month, there are enormous questions about how sustainable this pace truly is. Even if you burned 10 trillion coins a month, it would take five years to reduce the coin supply to less than 1 trillion.
Scenario #2: Increased demand for Shiba Inu tokens
The second scenario involves increased demand for Shiba Inu tokens. The way you can do this is by promoting the public benefit of the Shiba Inu blockchain. In theory, the more ways you can use the Shiba Inu blockchain, the more demand there will be for Shiba Inu tokens.
Image source: Getty Images.
The centerpiece of this strategy was the launch in August 2023 of Shibarium, a layer 2 scaling solution designed to improve the speed, efficiency, and overall throughput of the Shiba Inu blockchain. In many ways, Shibarium is similar to the popular layer 2 blockchains that now run on top of the network Ethereum (Crypto: ETH) blockchain.
But the question is how much new demand Shibarium will create for the Shiba Inu token. The launch of Shibarium was supposed to mark the beginning of a brave new world of blockchain gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), and Web3 applications. Some have even speculated that large companies may use Shibarium in their blockchain projects. While the number of transactions taking place on Shibarium appears to be on the rise in 2024, I am taking a wait-and-see approach to this for now.
Scenario #3: Shiba Inu as AI currency
Finally, there's the most likely scenario of all: the Shiba Inu becoming the AI's currency. Since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been a growing debate about the potential intersection between AI and cryptocurrencies. In one potential use case, autonomous AI agents would pay for data and computing resources in cryptocurrency. You can think of these autonomous agents as AI-powered bots that you trust with real money to carry out tasks throughout the day.
Right now, most people believe that Bitcoin will become the currency of artificial intelligence. In fact, late last year, Ark Invest devoted an entire 90-minute podcast to Bitcoin becoming an AI currency. In January of this year, Palantir Technologies (NYSE: BLT) Co-founder Joe Lonsdale told CNBC that the top three candidates to become an AI currency are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana (encryption:sol).
But what if the Shiba Inu became the currency of artificial intelligence? As Elon Musk famously said, sometimes the most enjoyable outcome is the most likely outcome. And what could be more fun than the famous Shiba Inu dog becoming the mascot for artificial intelligence? If dog-loving AI bots start using Shiba Inu to pay for data and computing power, the price of the token could skyrocket.
Improbable mathematics to become a millionaire
The math behind becoming a Shiba Inu millionaire sure is tempting. Right now, for example, the Shiba Inu is trading at a very low price of $0.000009. So, for just $10, you can purchase over a million Shiba Inu tokens. If the price of the token reaches $1, you are a millionaire.
But as we saw in the scenarios above, the possibility of a Shiba Inu going from $0.000009 to $1 is highly unlikely, if not impossible. Remember – the all-time high for the Shiba Inu is only $0.00009, which is too close to zero for my liking. As a result, the Shiba Inu is probably nothing more than a lottery ticket these days and should not be part of a long-term buy-and-hold portfolio.
