Shiba Inu Fans Sign Petition for Robinhood Listing As Crypto Drops 75% This Month
[Newsweek, Getty]
Enthusiasts of the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency token are continuing to sign a petition calling on trading platform Robinhood to adopt the meme coin.
The petition was created during the token’s rapid price rise around two weeks ago. The price has since plummeted, down just under 50 percent over the past seven days at the time of writing.
The petition, posted to Change.org by a user called Tristan Luke, had received more than 38,500 signatures at the time of writing.
It states that Dogecoin has “been a huge success for Robinhood” and suggests that Shibu Inu could have a similar effect.
Between May 7 and May 10 Shiba Inu saw a sudden surge in popularity, increasing in price from around $0.0000015 to $0.000038—an all-time high, according to CoinMarketCap data.
However, the token then crashed in price and is currently down more than 77 percent from its May 10 ceiling.
Dogecoin, the popular cryptocurrency token started as a joke in 2013, was accepted onto Robinhood back in July 2018.
Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the price volatility of cryptocurrency, as well as the hype surrounding new tokens.
It then experienced a surge in popularity this year, rising from a price of around $0.05 in early April to an all-time high of $0.73 on May 8.
Dogecoin, like Shiba Inu, has experienced a drastic fall in price recently. It is down over 36 percent over the past seven days to $0.32.
Shiba Inu presents itself as a rival to Dogecoin, even nicknaming itself the “Dogecoin killer.”
Adrian Zduńczyk, founder of cryptocurrency trade group the The Birb Nest and co-founder of the YellowBlock blockchain educational platform, told Newsweek earlier this month that Shiba Inu and other meme coins like it are “another edition of hype-riders which are supposed to use the demand for already over-hyped Dogecoin.”
In April, Andreas Park, associate professor of finance at the University of Toronto, told Newsweek the volatility of cryptocurrency tokens is “staggering” and said “it is entirely possible that many of these assets will disappear within a few years.”
The cryptocurrency market as a whole took a hit last week and China announced it would crack down harder on use of the technology.
Over the weekend bitcoin mining operations Huobi Mall and BTC.TOP suspended their operations in China because of greater restrictions from Beijing.
Bitcoin, which hit an all-time high of $64,863 in April this year, fell to around $33,000 on Sunday afternoon. It is currently valued at around $36,400.
BY ED BROWNE