Bitcoin and all other major cryptocurrencies tumbled overnight, but amid the turmoil, one currency continued to buck the trend.
In a wash of red in the cryptocurrency market Thursday morning, a coin of the brightest shade of green remained.
The shiba inu dog cryptocurrency (SHIB) has continued to break records in its best week in which it has risen more than 111 percent and hit a new high just after 6 a.m. after surging 40 percent overnight.
According to CoinGecko, SHIB hit $ 0.00008088 this morning, representing an improvement of 140 million percent compared to its low last year in November.
While its price may not seem like much, it is a massive increase since the coin first traded in August 2020 at $ 0.000000000972 and comes a morning where bitcoin and most other major currencies fell dramatically.
Created in August 2020 by an anonymous person who called himself "Ryoshi" as a derivative of dogecoin, SHIB is now competing with its predecessor in market capitalization after breaking the $ 30 billion barrier.
The coin, which has the Japanese dog as a pet, is now hot on the heels of dogecoin, which ranks 10th among cryptocurrencies by market capitalization at $ 31 billion.
Much of the increase is attributed to rumors about the coin's listing on the Robinhood trading platform.
Ironically, those rumors have seen SHIB achieve a larger market capitalization than Robinhood, which is $ 30 billion.
Coinmomo, a cryptocurrency analytics website, reported over the weekend, without citing any source, that SHIB would be listed on Robinhood on monday.
Although the coin was not listed on Monday, Robinhood had sent a survey to users asking what cryptocurrencies they traded and included shiba inu as an option.
A petition in Change.org imploring Robinhood to list SHIB on its platform has garnered more than 360,000 signatures as of this writing.
Twitter users are bullish on the coin, especially after a few words of choice from Robinhood's CFO on Wednesday Australian time.
On Tuesday local time, Wall Street analysts asked Robinhood executives during a conference call if they were going to include additional cryptocurrencies on their platform.
"We are hearing from customers who want more coins," said the company's chief financial officer, Jason Warnick.
โWe are being, you know, very attentive and diligent in this space. It is evolving from a regulatory perspective. A number of questions have been raised about the currencies on other platforms being potentially unregistered securities. "
He added: โWe think it's the right thing to do, not just for shareholders and for the company, but also for customers to make sure that we, you know, apply the same kind of diligence to any new currency. โฆ We listen to our customers and they want more features, so we're going to be working, you know, as quickly as possible with the right balance of security and compliance to make sure we don't missteps here. "
In late 2013, American software engineer Billy Markus and Australian businessman Jackson Palmer created dogecoin as a joke to poke fun at the wild crypto speculation at the time.
They used a Japanese dog, a shiba inu, as a pet for their currency.
Shiba inu is now only two places behind dogecoin on the crypto leaderboard, with doge at number 10.
In just over a year, SHIB has almost caught up with Doge, which has been on the market for seven years.
Analysts argue that it is a sign that the market is "overheated."
"Dog coins are coming back to the moon, which has historically been a very good indication of an overheated market," analysts at Delphi Digital said in a market note published Monday. โThe first time dog coins went crazy was in April - May of this year, and they quickly collapsed as the cryptocurrency markets cooled off. In early September, doggy coins were back in vogue and the crypto market as a whole experienced a fairly deep weakening. "
