That's why Shiba Inu is all smoke and no roast

Shiba Inus (quotation SHIB) is about a good game. Reading the crypto meme's Twitter feed and white paper (called a “woof paper”) is like playing buzzword bingo for meme projects and cryptography in general. Metaverse? Done. DeFi? There is. Crypto gaming? There is. Community? There is. Friend of celebrities? Done. And of course, the now obligatory Shiba Inu dog. Bingo.

But despite all the talk, the Shiba Inu isn't built on a solid foundation. Once you scratch the surface, there are too many things that don't add up. For example, his document describes Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as a "friend of SHIB". But the cryptocurrency visionary did not want or ask to receive 50% of the SHIB tokens - most likely it was a marketing gimmick. Likewise, Buterin's decision to donate the tokens to an Indian COVID relief fund was his alone, and had nothing to do with Shiba Inu.

The main driver for the price increase appears to be the token burning - deliberately taking the coins out of circulation. It's a bit like a stock buyback that essentially raises the price of a crypto. And SHIB's market cap - the total number of tokens multiplied by the price - has only increased by about 200% since last June. His latest metaverse project is symptomatic of Shiba Inu's tendency towards hype over substance. Here are some of the reasons why.

1. Make a dog dinner of your metaverse launch with unnecessary hype

Two days before the announcement of the Shiba Inu metaverse, the team tweeted a teaser, telling people, “You see, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to take a ride, you can get around. Stay tuned for March 30th ”. This sparked all sorts of speculation about what the announcement would be, but ultimately it didn't add much to what we already knew.

The lengthy announcement contained information on how many plots of land would be for sale, a URL for a new website that isn't up and running yet, and another mention of its Shibarium layer 2 solution. But we already knew a lot about that. And unsurprisingly, Shibarium, which would reduce transaction fees, isn't ready yet. If it was, this might actually have justified some of the hype. SHIB needs to start announcing things it has done, not things it plans to do.

2. Doesn't have a metaverse yet

Metaverses took the cryptocurrency world by storm last year, but building metaverses takes time. It is not the same as a crypto token that can be developed in a couple of hours. For example, a popular project, The Sandbox (SAND), took four years to build and is still rolling out its phased world. I don't expect Shiba Inu to release a new working virtual world in a few months, but so far there is nothing.

Compare this to some of the other promising metaverse projects in development. Their websites contain information on the technology used, teasers of what the world might look like, links to NFT galleries, and development roadmaps. Shiba Inu has none of this. If you go to the new website, the only thing there is a static photo of a dog in a forest.