Leading cryptocurrency wallet tracker WhaleStats has reported that the total SHIB holdings of the top 100 whales on the Ethereum blockchain have remained at the same level for nearly two weeks, despite recent price volatility.
Thus, SHIB seems to have become something of a “stablecoin” for the owners of these wallets, which they continue to hold no matter what happens in the market.
SHIB: From ATH in October to crypto winter
For Ethereum’s top 100 whales, the Shiba Inu meme coin is among the top 10 assets they hold, and has been since last year. It just moved up from the top 1-2 spots to fifth.
From time to time, it also appears in the list of the top 10 digital currencies traded by these whales.
However, these whales used to hold far more SHIB coins than they do today. Last year, the cumulative volumes of Shiba Inu stored by the whales in their wallets reached one billion USD, sometimes more, sometimes less. Last year, at the end of October, the price of the token reached an all-time high, climbing to the $0.00008845 level. SHIB and many other altcoins have followed here Bitcoin reaching an all-time high of nearly $69,000 in November 2021.
This year, the crypto-currency market has seen a sharp decline stimulated by the well-known events that began in late February, spurred by the subsequent energy price crisis.
Since then, whale interest in SHIB has begun to wane, it seems, as the volumes of the meme currency they were holding began to dwindle in the summer, and then fell further as fall arrived.
“Stablecoin” for whales or a coin held “just in case”?
Over the summer, whale SHIB holdings began to shrink rigorously, dropping first below $1 million, then below $500 million and finally below $100 million.
In October, they fell below $80 million and have since held a position “stable” around $70 million. At the time of printing, their compound portfolio contains $74,511,078 in SHIBs. Sometimes the whales add a few million USD into this meme token but then sell them when the market situation becomes more favorable.
Currently, SHIB is changing hands at $0.000009248. On October 29, it reached a high of $0.00001241. However, in early November, the market was rocked by the collapse of FTX and bitcoin began to plunge, dragging altcoins down with it. Shiba Inu thus “added“another zero to its price, which has collapsed.
What SHIB can bring us in the future
The Shiba Inu development team is currently busy working on two major projects: the SHIB Metaverse and the long-awaited layer 2 protocol, Shibarium.
The release date for both projects has not yet been set. However, the SHIB developers and The Third Floor studio, which is working on the SHIB metaverse, recently showed the public concept art for several new hubs.
As for Shibarium, SHIB lead developer Shytoshi Kusama keeps telling the community that it will be ready “coming soon“, without revealing a precise or even approximate date for its release.
Last month, he posted a confusing tweet, in which he stated that the “initial design had been approved” and that he could now “double the bet.” Many in the comment thread thought he was referring to a progress on Shibarium.