Shiba Inu Hits a Milestone More Impressive Than Landing AMC

If you think the rally from the coronavirus pandemic bottom has been stellar for Wall Street, you should take a closer look at the gains from the cryptocurrency space. In a roughly 20-month stretch, the aggregate value of all digital currencies has catapulted from $141 billion to $2.66 trillion (about a 19-fold increase).

As you might imagine, Bitcoin and Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) have played a key role in pushing the total crypto market cap higher. These “blue-chip” coins make up approximately 62% of the aforementioned $2.66 trillion. But when the curtain closes on 2021 in less than five weeks, it’ll be meme coin Shiba Inu (CRYPTO:SHIB) garnering most of the attention.

Breaking down how Shiba Inu delivered 2021’s most-impressive gain

Take every big gain you’ve heard about in the stock market and throw it out the window, because no stock market rallies come close to what we’ve witnessed in Shiba Inu this year. At its peak, SHIB tokens rallied more than 121,000,000% between midnight Jan. 1 to its all-time intra-day high on Oct. 27. If you’d invested less than a dollar at the beginning of the year and we’re lucky enough to sell your stake at the peak, you became a millionaire.

Shiba Inu coin’s life-altering gains are the result of a confluence of factors. In no particular order:

• The launch of decentralized exchange ShibaSwap has helped improve liquidity and offered hodlers the ability to stake their coins. Staking is critical to lengthening average hold time.
• More crypto exchanges than ever are listing SHIB tokens for trading, which is helping to increase awareness of the coin and grow the community.
• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who was gifted roughly half of Shiba Inu’s 1 quadrillion token supply by mysterious founder “Riyoshi,” sent approximately 410 trillion of these tokens to a dead blockchain address. In short, Buterin’s coin burn removed around 41% of SHIB’s supply with a single click.
• The psychological fear of missing out (FOMO) has investors piling in without paying any credence to SHIB’s already monstrous year-to-date gains.

Perhaps most important, Shiba Inu gained some semblance of legitimacy when it snagged movie theater chain AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) as its first major merchant. AMC CEO Adam Aron posted a Twitter poll in late October asking folks whether his company should accept SHIB for online payment. More than 87% of the 153,100 respondents favored the idea. According to Aron, AMC should have SHIB integrated for payment by the first quarter of 2022.

This milestone has more meaning than Shiba Inu landing AMC

If this were any other month of Shiba Inu’s existence — it was launched on Aug. 1, 2020 — there would be no question that AMC accepting SHIB tokens would be the highlight catalyst. But November saw an even more important milestone for Shiba Inu and its…