TL;DR
The popular meme coin – Shiba Inu – has been among the best-performing cryptocurrencies in the past 24 hours, witnessing a price increase of over 25%. Moreover, its market capitalization surpassed the $8.5 billion mark for the first time in a year.
Its remarkable rally comes at a time when Bitcoin (BTC) trades well above the $60K mark, while Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and many more altcoins have peaked at multi-year highs.
The global cryptocurrency market capitalization inches towards the $2.5 trillion level, with some industry participants expecting this to be just the beginning of a massive bull run that could last in the near future.
Another element that might have positively impacted SHIB’s performance as of late is the frenzy in the meme coin niche. Dogecoin (DOGE) witnessed a 30% price jump on a daily scale, Bonk Inu (BONK) skyrocketed by 40%, while dogwifhat (WIF) hit a new all-time high.
According to IntoTheBlock, over 56% of Shiba Inu holders currently sit on paper profits. The trends were much different in September last year, when approximately 90% of SHIB investors were underwater.
It is worth noting that Shiba Inu’s price ascent came shortly after the development team behind the meme coin introduced a new tool for enhancing user privacy. As CryptoPotato reported, the innovation, known as “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), enables “complete on-chain data protection” to members of the SHIB community.
Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous developer leading meme coin, said that the tool is a “seminal milestone in delivering their promise to turn the SHIB community into a “nation-state” of “Shibizens.”
Dr. Rand Hindi, an entrepreneur and CEO of Zama, chipped in, too, arguing that FHE will “catalyze the growth” of the Shiba Inu ecosystem and allow “a wide range of new use cases” on the platform.
