How Much Could This Catalyst Boost Shiba Inu in October?

• “Shiba Eternity” is a new digital card game that will be available on iOS and Android starting Oct. 6.
• A small portion of the profits generated by the game will be burned.
• Shiba Inu still faces a number of significant hurdles to long-term gains.

The Shiba Inu community continues to innovate, but it’s unclear whether the token’s languishing price can be resurrected.

Shiba Inu (SHIB 0.28%) was the star performer of 2021, not just in cryptocurrency, but across the financial world as a whole. It made history with a gain of 43,800,000% for the year, which could have turned you into a millionaire for the price of a cup of coffee — if your timing was perfect.

But 2022 hasn’t been so positive. In fact, the price-per-Shiba Inu token has plunged by about 69% for the year so far. There’s a long list of reasons for the pivot in investor sentiment, including a broad sell-off in high-risk assets and the fact that Shiba Inu has failed to garner mass adoption. 

The community is working on several initiatives to help resurrect the token’s value, but nothing has made a material impact thus far. But if there’s one thing that could drum up some momentum this month, it’s the release of a particular new game on Oct. 6.

Enter Shiba Eternity

The new game is titled Shiba Eternity, and it will be available on mobile devices through Apple‘s App Store and Alphabet‘s Play Store. It’s a collectible card game (digital cards, of course), which will allow players to battle each other in a concept not dissimilar to other card-based games like Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokémon.

Each player will be granted a Shiboshi — a digital Shiba Inu dog-like avatar — which they’ll need to protect from incurring damage in each clash. The general structure of the game could allow for competitive tournaments in the future and the chance to win prizes. 

Owning Shiba Inu tokens isn’t a requirement to participate, but there is hope the game becomes popular enough to generate some interest in the token that started it all. However, Shytoshi Kusama, who is considered the lead developer of Shiba Inu, recently revealed that 5% of the proceeds earned from the game will be burned — a mechanism that removes Shiba Inu tokens from circulation forever. 

The burn is Shiba Inu’s last shot at redemption

Shiba Eternity is just the latest in a series of interactive, entertaining ways to reduce the number of Shiba Inu tokens in supply. Why? Because right now, there are over 590 trillion of them which is hindering its ability to appreciate in value. One Shiba Inu token costs just $0.000011 to buy as of this writing, and it would be virtually impossible to reach a more typical price of $1, for example.

If that were to happen, Shiba Inu would have a total value of $590 trillion, making it the most valuable asset in the entire world. Not even the most bullish investors consider that to be a likely outcome. 

Therefore, the only way the token could reach a level like $1 is by significantly reducing the number of them in circulation, though roughly 99.9998% of them would have to vanish to make that a reality. The community can help the burn initiative by simply sending Shiba Inu tokens to a “dead wallet,” or they could transact with a participating business like the Shiba Coffee Co., which burns a portion of its profits.

But in any case, at the current average daily burn rate, it could take thousands of years to remove enough tokens to generate a meaningful price boost. And even if it happens, it won’t actually result in an increase in value for investors because they’ll simply own fewer tokens with a higher per-token value, leaving their net position the same.