In November I bought 1,000 Shiba Inu coins because there were rumors it may be listed on Robinhood. In my opinion young kids who could buy the Doge Coin on their Robinhood app was one of the main reasons the Dogecoin skyrocketed last year. The same can be said for the gamestock stock.
Unsophisticated, emotional people that thought the dog logo of the dogecoin was cute, or had memories of hangning out at gamestock as a kid renting the next game for their XBox. When the sheep start moving everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.
So I bought 1,000 Shiba Inu Coins thinking if the coin gets listed on Robinhood we could see the same type of movement, doesn’t look that is going to happen anytime soon, but I will hang on to my Shiba Inu for awhile, it is part of my very speculative crypto portfolio.
If you don’t know or haven’t heard the legendary Dogecoin story, here it is, and some say it is not over yet.
The cryptocurrency Dogecoin was launched in 2013 as a joke.
The founders of the controversial coin based it on a then-popular meme of a Shiba Inu dog that speaks in broken English. They wanted to make fun of the way people bought into crypto without fully understanding the coins.
The joke backfired. Dogecoin, a digital currency with no white paper, no paid staff, and no fundamentals, has soared 14,000% in value this year and now has a market cap of almost $80 billion. That’s bigger than global computer company Dell, which has 165,000 employees.
If you’d bought one Dogecoin on May 4, 2016, it would have cost $0.000227. Back then, Dogecoin was used to tip people small amounts on social networks because it had such a tiny value. Today that same coin (at time of writing) would be worth $0.54 — an increase of over 237,000%.
It would have been difficult to buy a fraction of a cent’s worth of Dogecoin, so let’s look at it a different way.
- If you’d bought $10 worth of Dogecoin five years ago, that would be about 44,050 Dogecoin. Today, that would be worth almost $23,800.
- If you’d bought $100 worth of Dogecoin five years ago, you’d have 440,500 Dogecoin. That would be worth $237,885 today.
- And if you’d bought $500 worth of Dogecoin five years ago, you’d have over $1 million worth of Dogecoin now.
Who let the Doge out?
If you’re looking at those eye-watering numbers and wondering whether you should buy Dogecoin, you might want to understand what can happen when the those that can’t think for themselves follow the crowds. They start tearing down historical statues and buying cute crypto coins with no value in the real world.
- Celebrity endorsements: Tesla CEO and crypto enthusiast Elon Musk is one of Doge’s most high profile fans. Every time he tweets about the coin, its price jumps even higher. Like a SpaceX rocket, Musk seems determined to propel Doge to the moon. Yes, there are rumors that Must actually owns over 3 billion dollars worth of Doge.
- Memes: Another reason for Doge’s popularity? An almost endless supply of amusing memes. As a result, people are attracted to the coin that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
- Community: Musk dubbed Doge the “people’s coin” because it has such a huge and active following. Until the price jumped this year, it cost a fraction of a cent to buy Doge. For many, it served as a stepping stone into crypto.
Cryptocurrency is incredibly new, which makes it difficult to assess a coin’s fundamentals. We only have a decade or so of data, and there’s a lot of hype. That’s why it’s hard to know what metrics to use to evaluate these digital currencies. As such, there’s a small chance that memes and community will give Dogecoin value in the future. It’s just very difficult to see how.
Some people recommend Dogecoin as a speculative buy. Others see it as everything that’s worrisome about crypto. Personally, I think crypto is already speculative enough without multiplying the risk with even more speculation. Investing for the long term can be a lot less stressful — and often a lot more profitable — than trying to time the market on speculative investments.
There are a lot of exciting cryptocurrencies out there that are trying to use blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and solve real-world problems. They won’t all succeed. Since we can’t see the future, the best we can do is use the information we have to make decisions about what might perform well in the long run.
The short history of cryptocurrency has shown us that when a coin with no real use case takes off and has a moon shot based upon manipulation by Elon Musk or any other person the masses feel they should listen to, after they drop they rarely recover. That is why in my mind at least you are better off trying to figure out what the next possible moonshot could be. For that reason I bought Shiba in hopes that Robinhood would add the coin to its trading platform, but doesn’t appear that will happen soon.
By Connor Sephton2mCreated 23h ago, last updated 23h ago
Overall, the trading platform made a net loss of $423 million in Q4, and believes revenue growth in the first quarter of 2022 will be disappointing to say the least.
Table of Contents
Robinhood’s CEO has suggested that the exchange has no plans to list SHIBA INU any time soon.
On an earnings call with investors after releasing financial results for the fourth quarter of 2021, Vlad Tenev has asked whether the trading platform plans to add further cryptocurrencies — with SHIB singled out specifically. In response, he said:
“So we’ve been hearing from customers loudly. We know they want more cryptocurrencies on the platform, and we’ve actually been proactively engaging with regulators. So the main concern with adding a large number of coins is that platforms that are adding lots of them could be adding unregistered securities. So they’re watching the space closely. We’re being deliberate. We want to avoid triggering SEC registration requirements for cryptocurrencies. “Reading between the lines, it seems SHIBA INU may not be a good fit for Robinhood as regulatory scrutiny of digital assets grows — news that will come as a disappointment to 556,000 people who have signed a Change.org petition calling for the memecoin to be listed. Tenev added:
“We have robust protocols in place. We feel very confident about the coins that we have on the platform, and we intend to add more coins going forward that we want to do it prudently.”
Disappointing Results
Robinhood’s shares tanked by as much as 15% in after-hours trading. Monthly active users have plunged from 18.9 million to 17.3 million in the space of three months, and by comparison, analysts had projected this would actually grow to 19.8 million. Overall, the trading platform made a net loss of $423 million in Q4, and believes revenue growth in the first quarter of 2022 will be disappointing to say the least. It doesn’t help matters that these results will be compared with the same period a year earlier, which is when GameStop and Dogecoin mania was dominating the markets.
Announcing the results, the company added:
“Robinhood has set aggressive goals to start opening its crypto platform up to customers internationally in 2022. The company believes in the immense potential of the crypto economy and sees a big opportunity in serving customers across the globe.”
