Famous American whistleblower Edward Snowden has cautioned investors against the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIBN), suggesting on social media that the cryptocurrency is more of a gamble than an investment.
In a tweet shared with Snowden’s 5 million followers, he said that if investors were talked out of buying SHIB with their savings, they need to “carefully consider” their “odds of outsmarting a market” that sold them its stake in “not even dog money but a CLONE of dog Money.”
Snowden added that if the tweet upset readers they likely needed to reduce the size of their positions on the meme-inspired cryptocurrency. Interest in Shiba Inu has surged this year because of the cryptocurrency’s price performance.
SHIB was created based on Dogecoin (DOGE), which is itself a meme-inspired cryptocurrency. Shiba Inu competed with DOGE when the latter was pumping thanks to exploding search interest and tweets from celebrities including Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The cryptocurrency’s price performance has been such that an investor who bet $8,000 on it in August of 2020, buying up 70 trillion SHIB with his initial investment, at one point held over $5.7 billion worth of the cryptocurrency.
Shiba Inu, as CryptoGlobe has been reporting, exploded in the last few months to the point it has become the third-most Googled cryptocurrency so far this year. A study has shown Shiba Inu received 2.8 million searches on average per month so far this year, while bitcoin received 22 million average monthly searches. In second place came Ethereum, with 6.3 million average searches per month.
In a follow-up tweet, Snowden suggested that investing in Shiba Inu was fine as long as people put in money they could afford to lose, and not money they needed to deal with fixed expenses.
The cryptocurrency’s trading volume has surged to rival that of Ethereum after a supporter asked Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of rival meme-inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin how much SHIB Musk was holding. Musk revealed he only hold BTC, ETH, and DOGE.
Last week, digital asset-focused research firm Delphi Digital has revealed that historically dog coins, meaning cryptocurrencies inspired by the popular Shiba Inu meme, have historically been “a pretty good indication of an overheated market.”
The firm pointed out that from April to May of this year and in early September dog coins were “all the rage and quickly crated as crypto markets cooled off or saw a fairly deep de-leveraging.”
Michael Burry, the investor best known for his lucrative bet against the housing bubble ahead of the 2008 financial crisis that was immortalized in the book and movie “The Big Short,” has also revealed he is not a fan of Shiba Inu.
In a now-deleted tweet, the head of Scion Asset Management shared Coinbase’s description of the cryptocurrency and highlighted its supply, which exceeds one quadrillion tokens, and suggested it is not a good investment because of the vast amount in circulation.
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The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
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