Dogecoin vs. Shiba Inu - the Battle of the Doges

Memecoins have emerged as a separate category within the crypto sphere, just like DeFi and NFTs. Their combined market cap surpassed $85.28 billion, with a 24h trading volume spiking up to a whopping $28.57 billion as of writing. With this hype-fueled sector reaching such astounding numbers, memecoins cannot simply be ignored anymore.

Source: CoinMarketCap (Memecoins market cap and trading volume)

Two projects are currently dominating the memecoin category; Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB). Dogecoin is the larger of the two, and it’s currently sitting at a market cap of ~$71.86 billion. Shiba Inu, on the other hand, has a market cap of ~$7.52 billion. There is visibly a significant gap in market dominance, but if we talk about the returns for the last seven days alone, Dogecoin is down by 19% while Shiba Inu is up by 584% (mind-boggling, not a typo).

In this article, we will discuss some of the fundamental similarities and differences between two of these leading projects in the memecoins category so investors could have a better understanding of them.

Dogecoin, also known as the most favorite cryptocurrency of Twitter, was launched back in December 2013 by two software engineers, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. The Dogecoin project started as a joke (a Bitcoin parody), and it wasn't meant to be a real currency or serve a utility.

Dogecoin was themed after a viral meme of a friendly dog, Shiba Inu, that started from Reddit and quickly became the “meme of the internet.” Since there wasn't any real-world use case for DOGE, the Reddit community started using it to tip each other for posting valuable, cringe, or funny comments.

Dogecoin’s price didn’t pass even a couple of cents for many years. Surprisingly, the project started gaining traction at the start of the current 2021 crypto bull run, not because of its fundamentals, but due to numerous celebrities, influencers, and business magnates pumping it to its new heights with their tweets. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is still leading this Twitter movement from the front and started a trend, 'DOGE to the moon' that was picked up like a storm.

Over the past few months alone, DOGE spiked up in value by over 10,000% - quite an unimaginable feat. This super-hyped growth was fuelled purely by the Twitter community with their tweets, announcements, and speculations. With every tweet from a big influencer, DOGE went through upwards and downwards spikes.

Source: TradingView (doge started gaining traction in Q1 2021)

The Dogecoin project inherits a lot of its technology from Litecoin. It utilizes the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism that uses Scrypt, a lightweight and ASIC-resistant hashing algorithm that is less complex and more energy-efficient compared to Bitcoin's SHA-256. Dogecoin mining consumes fewer resources, and anyone with access to a GPU can start mining DOGE.

Dogecoin miners earn 10,000 DOGE per block, and the network is designed to have an average block time of ~1 minute. More than 129.6 billion DOGE are currently in circulation, and there is no fixed supply, meaning that 10,000 DOGE will be created per block, forever and ever.

The Dogecoin project also uses a UTXO model (Unspent Transaction Outputs) instead of an account-based model. The UTXO model is also used in Bitcoin and Litecoin, where instead of individual accounts, the coins represent ownership by associating one's address. When someone makes a transaction, the coins don't actually move, and only the ownership address associated with the coin is changed.

You can store DOGE on any of the exchange wallets that support it, or download one from their official website. You can send or receive DOGE just like any other cryptocurrency, with very minimal and near-zero transaction fees, unlike other Proof-of-Work-based cryptocurrencies. Due to its immense popularity, DOGE is supported by almost every multi-currency wallets these days.

Shiba Inu, nicknamed “The Doge Killer,” is yet another memecoin launched a few months ago. The project is named and themed after the Shiba Inu dog, the same legendary dog behind the Dogecoin project.

Compared to its price at launch, SHIB has generated an ROI of 11,36,344.94% to date, according to CoinMarketCap, which is utterly unbelievable. In the last seven days alone, its price is up by 584%. However, there is not enough liquidity in the market yet, so SHIB millionaires are all forced to have “diamond hands” right now.

However, despite its $7.2 billion market cap, the price of SHIB is on a steep downhill trajectory. Ryoshi, the founder of Shiba Inu, claims that he sent 50% of the SHIB tokens to Vitalik Buterin after the token launch. Vitalik dumped all the tokens and sent them to India's COVID relief fund, and this move has caused a slight dip.

Source: TradingView (shib rise at launch with a dip)

Unlike DOGE, SHIB is just an ERC-20 token that lives on Ethereum and is driven purely by the hype within its community. The SHIB token had less than a $500 million market cap before it was listed on any exchange. It was first listed on Huobi, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange that still holds the largest share of the SHIB's trading volume. Its market cap surged to over $11 billion when it was listed on other exchanges like KuCoin and other exchanges.

Another aspect of Shiba Inu which differentiates it from Dogecoin is the ecosystem that its team is building. There will be a Shiba Inu Ecosystem that will include a ShibaSwap decentralized exchange and a decentralized SHIB army of devs, fans, and coin holders.

The ShibaSwap exchange will feature three tokens; SHIB, LEASH (not yet launched), and BONE (not yet launched). The whitepaper also hinted that token holders would be able to stake or add liquidity to the ShibaSwap pool and earn rewards based on their share of the pool.

Rewards for the ShibaSwap exchange

Shiba Inu is a community-focused project, as Ryoshi pointed out in the whitepaper, “we are an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building.” All the hype around SHIB is not driven by financials, but rather by social factors. Since SHIB is an ERC-20 token, you can store it on Metamask or any wallet that supports custom ERC-20 tokens. Coinbase Wallet and Trust Wallet are two of the biggest multi-currency wallets that have recently added support for SHIB tokens.

Dogecoin and Shiba Inu might sound like similar projects, but they are very different from each other, both in terms of technology and social behavior. Dogecoin’s price movements are fuelled by celebrities and influencers, while Shiba Inu is micro-community driven and hasn't got the amount of attention Dogecoin has at the moment. Is SHIB a “DOGE killer?” We'll see. So far, DOGE has been winning in the dominance, while SHIB is winning the ROI battle.

At KuCoin, you can buy both DOGE and SHIB to get onto the bandwagon of the most popular memecoins by adding them to your portfolio. SHIB was recently added to KuCoin platform and is available to trade in a single USDT pair, whereas DOGE is available in four distinct trading pairs (USDT, USDC, KCS, and BTC).

SHIB or DOGE, which will go to the moon first?

Visit us at KuCoin, where you can buy, trade, and learn more about Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies.