With the success seen by Dogecoin in 2021, it was only a matter of time before a competitor (if you can call it that) challenged DOGE to be the king of memecoins.
Enter SHIBA INU, an ERC-20 token launched in summer 2020 that began to make headlines in 2021, following the success of Dogecoin. SHIB became a popular choice for traders who felt they had lost their boat with Dogecoin, and certainly rewarded those who had faith.
If you had invested $1,000 in SHIB at launch, you would have had a billion dollars when it reached its all-time high in October 2021. Just like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu has dropped quite a bit from his highs, but both can recover.
If you’re trying to decide which memecoin might be the best option, this guide will help you as we compare Dogecoin vs Shiba Inu.
Table of Contents:
Quick overview of Dogecoin
Dogecoin (DOGE) was started in 2013 by Jackson Palmer, an Adobe software engineer, and Billy Markus, an IBM software engineer.
It only took about 3 hours to change the original Bitcoin code to create Dogecoin according to Markus. The Dogecoin network was launched in December 2013, reaching an all-time high of nearly 73 cents in May 2021. It is currently trading below 10 cents a piece.
The asset uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism just like Bitcoin, with blocks mined every minute and 10k DOGE coming into circulation through each block reward. Markus and Palmer walked away from Dogecoin in 2015, while influential figures such as Elon Musk stepped in to support the memecoin.
Shiba Inu Quick Overview
SHIBA INU (SHIB) was created in August 2020 by a pseudonymous person who calls himself “Ryoshi” with the aim of being a direct competitor of the original meme coin that is Dogecoin. SHIB started with a total supply of 1 quadrillion SHIB.
A quadrillion has 15 zeros or is 1,000 trillion in other words. Half of the offer was placed in Uniswap for the purpose of providing liquidity pools. The other half was sent to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin with the hope that it would burn it. Buterin burned over 400 trillion SHIB while selling the rest and donating the proceeds to Covid relief efforts in India.
SHIB has rapidly increased in popularity over the past year, reaching an all-time high of $0.00008845 in October 2021. It’s down more than 80% from that high, now trading at $0.00001 per SHIB.
Comparison between Doge and Shiba Tokenomics
DOGE and SHIB are two very different resources when it comes to their tokenomics. This is for a couple of reasons. First, they work on completely different consensus mechanisms and, moreover, Dogecoin is its network while Shiba Inu is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum.
Dogecoin uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, just like Bitcoin, and therefore can be mined. Dogecoin block rewards occur approximately every minute, at which time 10,000 new DOGE enter circulation. On the contrary, SHIB’s offer is already in circulation and no more SHIB will be added to the supply. However, DOGE has a circulating supply current that is one-fifth that of SHIB, meaning it is a much poorer memecoin.
Secondly, DOGE transactions are quite cheap compared to SHIB ones. This is because there is a low transaction cost on the Dogecoin network, while SHIB uses Ethereum as its network, meaning it is subject to the notoriously high gas fees that come with ETH. This also means that you must own ETH to transact with SHIB outside of an exchange, as it is the resource needed to pay gas taxes. This may change if ETH 2.0 starts successfully.
Comparing Shiba Inu vs Dogecoin Utility
When it comes to utility, at least right now, SHIB actually comes out on edge. This is because SHIB is a token on a smart contract-enabled blockchain in Ethereum and thus inherits all the benefits of smart contracts. In addition to being available on a variety of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), the team behind SHIB launched ShibaSwap, their own DEX. On ShibaSwap, users can wager their SHIB and earn rewards in addition to being able to exchange it for any other ERC-20 token. In contrast, there are no smart contracts on Dogecoin, although rumors that will eventually come began circulating last May with no development since.
In terms of its use as a payment currency, Dogecoin currently holds the advantage between the two dogs, as transactions are much cheaper with DOGE than with SHIB solely because of the ETH gas fees required to send SHIB. More and more merchants are starting to accept DOGE as a payment method, giving it some additional utility, although there are many other resources that could become the ideal crypto payment method for merchants to accept.
DOGE vs SHIB Conclusion: Memecoins are Memecoins
The reality of the DOGE vs SHIB debate is that regardless of which is considered a better memecoin, it is still a memecoin. In this sense, the idea that one of the two assets is a good investment is pure speculation, as neither brings anything particularly innovative to the cryptocurrency industry.
Rather, they
are fun speculative activities that you can buy a lot for very little money, which leads to a unitary bias for many newcomers. While some people like the idea of buying millions of a coin at the same price as a fraction of Bitcoin, you should probably have more behind your investment strategy than getting many units of something.
While we can argue about which is best right now, it could be a debate about what was the worst long-term investment. Time will tell.
