There are several thousand use cases and equally as many types of crypto on the market today. People often find few to support and help build a community around & hope to increase its value. Some tokens have managed to find success despite relatively niche or low use case, all thanks to a strong community. SHIB is one of the latest examples where the community makes or brakes the crypto.
The SHIB token was created by an anonymous founder by the name Ryoshi, it was meant to be an experiment in decentralized community building to see if a community behind a token can bring it up in marketcap. Ryoshi created the token ontop of Ethereum where he minted several trillion SHIB tokens that were split 50/50 between Uniswap & Vitalik Buterin. The developer is remaining anonymous as he wants to place focus on community, taking no SHIB for himself other than those he bought with his own money.
SHIB made a large splash spiking up to 6 times its value just few days before, before seeing a large dip, this was due to large amount of token sales, most of them being from Vitalik's donation to India COVID relief effort. The project has since kind of hovered in uncertainty, Ryoshi along with some volunteer devs make new changes and improve upon SHIB's functionality to bring more concrete use to the token. There are plans to launch native NFTs and a fully fleshed out artist incubator along with this. But so far the change can be mainly condensed into ShibaSwap, a DEX focused mainly on the new token BONE.
Currently, the SHIB ecosystem is made up of 3 tokens: SHIB, BONE & LEASH. All of these serve different functions, and it's important to keep them separate, splitting use amongst tokens can often make the original token lose value and be more risk, or it can be a good idea creating more stability or just down right be a necessity (FARM & IFARM). The token runs solely on smart contracts to help keep itself safe.
SHIB has very limited use case, it's a speculative asset (like all crypto) with the only current real use case being its use on Shibaswap up until all the talked about features are rolled out for it. Best feature would be staking SHIB but that would net you return in BONE instead, not SHIB (the APY for SHIB is too low, most CEX have better APY). Before we look at the suprisingly strong BONE, quick rundown of LEASH: it was supposed to be pegged to DOGE but was set out with a rebase, 100k total supply and has similar features on ShibSwap as SHIB.
BONE really shines on ShibaSwap, similar to FARM on Harvest Finance. Most DEX plays favorite to help promote their tokens and here that is actually BONE. For example burying/staking SHIB will currently net you 0.22%APY (ATH was around 0.5%) whilst giving you around +80% BONE APY. That is on par with most other large DEXes, keep in mind that this depends on how many are using the pair/feature, more users means that the APY will even out amongst users. Bone is ShibaSwap's reward token, so to speak.
I won't go into too much on the swap but would like to mention that it has many glaring issues, whilst trying it out the functions and pages would frequently break and their data didn't seem to update.
As stated previously functions for SHIB is close to none. ShibaSwap allows you to use SHIB, BONE & LEASH for staking (burying) for a decent APY on all tokens except for SHIB. There is basic swapping liquidity providing along with this with more features planned. Keep in mind that the DEX runs on ERC-20, the gas fees will take a hefty bite out of your investment, burying & pairs.
The main benefit that the token has is its ability to leverage the market trends in its favor. Its biggest strength as well as being its biggest weakness is the community behind the token. It has started to get some bite to its bark but is still very heavily reliant on its supporters, more so than most other crypto. . As it stands, SHIB has just a little reason for its marketcap as DOGE meaning that any investment into it can go either way, tread carefully.
