SHIBA INU has soared over the past 24 hours by nearly 20 per cent.
But why has the meme coin and self-proclaimed “Dogecoin killer” continued to increase in value?
Why is Shiba Inu’s (SHIB) price rising?
A number of reasons have contributed to Shiba Inu’s surge in value including an advertisement in New York City’s Times Square and rumours Tesla will start accepting the cryptocurrency.
The billboard in Times Square read: “We will reach the moon soon,” next to a cartoon Shiba Inu dog in a shirt and tie.
Rumours also started to circulate that electric car manufacturer Tesla could start accepting SHIB as a payment option.
Sawyer Merritt, who has more than 85,000 followers on Twitter, tweeted an image of the Tesla website source code showing Shiba Inu listed in the inspect element section during checkout.
He wrote: “So it appears the Tesla website source code shows SHIBA (aka $SHIB) under the payment type section in the code when clicking ‘inspect element’ during checkout. It’s not live however.”
A web developer under alias Hendra.eth responded to Sawyer’s tweet, confirming the code says SHIB will be a payment option for Tesla.
He wrote: “I’m a coder and from what I can see, seems like $SHIB is going to be part of payment gateway when you choose ‘Crypto’ on the checkout process.”
This extends Shiab Inu’s month-to-date gain to almost 900 per cent with the cryptocurrency gaining more than 85,000,000 per cent in the past year.
Why has Shiba Inu’s price previously increased?
Shiba Inu was developed by ‘Ryoshi’ and launched in July 2020.
In the first ten days of May, Shiba Inu’s price increased after the coin was listed on a number of large exchanges.
It then reached an all-time high on May 10, 2021 after being listed on Binance.
On May 12, Vitalik Buterin donated $1billion worth of SHIB to a Covid-19 relief fund in India causing the token to half in value.
After months of little movement, Shiba Inu’s price increased by 34 per cent on September 16 after Coinbase listed the coin.
The price then increased by over 200 per cent in October’s first week on the back of increased buying by whales and large investors.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s picture of his new Shiba Inu puppy with the caption Floki Frunkpuppy on Twitter also caused the coin’s value to soar.
The price then increased again as the team behind Shiba Inu entered the NFT space and released a digital collection of 10,000 “lovable creatures” on October 14 which sold out in just over 35 minutes.
One of the largest Brazilian exchanges Novadax as well as trading app Public listed SHIB on October 20.
On October 24 Shiba Inu reached a new all-time high and become the 11th-biggest cryptocurrency by market value after a petition on Change.org asking Robinhood to list SHIB on its platform reached more than 300,000 signatures.
The Shiba Inu coin reached $0.0000455 on October 24, topping the previous record of $0.0000388 reached on May 10.
SHIB broke into the top ten of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies by market cap in the last week of October 2021, having flipped both Dogecoin and the USDC stablecoin.
