If You Invested $100 in Shiba Inu, Here's How Much You'd Have Now | The Motley Fool (2024)

When most investors think about Shiba Inu (SHIB -8.49%), they think about massive gains. After all, this popular meme token soared 45,000,000% last year. But your gain as a Shiba Inu investor may not be anywhere as great as that. Your successes depend on when you invested and how much you bet on this young cryptocurrency.

Well, how about if you put $100 into Shiba Inu a year ago? Would you be enjoying riches today? Let's take a look at what your investment would look like right now.

More than 40 million tokens

Shiba Inu was priced at about $0.00000249 a year ago. With $100 you could have bought 40,160,642 tokens. Today, at the price of $0.00002525, your investment would be worth $1,014. If you had sold at Shiba Inu's peak, you would have made more than $3,100 on your investment. In both cases, Shiba Inu didn't make you a millionaire. But multiplying your investment by 10 (or more) is still something to cheer about.

Now let's look at why Shiba Inu was such a winner -- and why it's given up some of its gains. Shiba Inu built momentum thanks to its loyal fans. They're known as the Shib Army and can be found on social media encouraging everyone to get in on the Shiba Inu story. In fact, Shiba Inu's whitepaper even says the cryptocurrency was built as "an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building."

Why didn't the good times keep rolling for Shiba Inu? It's important to remember that Shiba Inu isn't a blockchain hosting decentralized applications. This limits this player's potential in the world of cryptocurrencies. Shiba Inu is unlikely to change the way business is done. That's because it's just a token based on the Ethereum blockchain. Shiba Inu's main uses are for trading, staking, and as payment at certain merchants.

Rebounding from lows

And all of this means Shiba Inu, at a certain point, lost steam. Community support can only bring a cryptocurrency so far -- especially considering the thousands of rivals out there. Still, Shiba Inu has rebounded from its lows this year, and there's been some bright news on the horizon. The cryptocurrency has entered the metaverse. And Shiba Inu also expects to launch a scaling solution this year -- one that will lower the cost of transactions. Planned coin burns are also positive. That's because a smaller supply of the token will offer it room to gain in value.

All of these elements could boost your Shiba Inu investment. But I don't expect gains to be huge -- or long lasting. That's because even with these bits of good news, Shiba Inu doesn't stand out from rivals. And that means this crypto player may not be able to convince a huge number of investors to jump on and stay on the bandwagon for the long term.