Will Shiba Inu’s New Metaverse Take It to the Next Level?

Popular meme coin Shiba Inu recently announced the launch of its own metaverse titled ‘SHIB: The Metaverse’ with 100,595 plots of virtual land for sale, to be sold in stages. The sale itself will not include any of its native eco-system tokens such as SHIB, but instead the team decided to use a neutral coin that can easily be sold into stablecoins: “Using our Ecosystem Tokens is a risk, as we would need to dump our own tokens price cashing them! And that’s far away from our plans,” the team confirm on its blog announcing the metaverse plans.

What this means in practice is that users therefore need to use ETH to buy, not any Shib-related tokens. The introductory stage has 36,431 plots for sale, divided into four categories: Silver Fur, Gold Tail, Platinum Paw and Diamond Teeth and priced between 0.2 ether (ETH) to 1 ETH and divided into four districts, growth, defense, technology, and the currencies district. “Some lands will remain locked as they represent key locations for travel within the metaverse and stay private to be used as common grounds. These will represent roads (corridors): Avenues, Boulevards, and Hubs, while public ones will be available for purchase,” the team confirmed.

Also, contained in the metaverse announcement was confirmation that the current three native tokens of the project SHIB, LEASH and BONE, will all play a role in the virtual world in the future. Holders of LEASH or Shiba Inu NFTs have priority when purchasing virtual land. While users who hold virtual land can earn passive income and other incentives. “We will be introducing the first special role that Shiba Inu $SHIB will play in the metaverse,” the announcement added. “By welcoming a mechanic to burn $SHIB independently while renaming your land plot, furthermore, this should start soon after land events and public sale have ended.”

Supporting the launch of its metaverse the project’s official blog, incudes the secrets behind the Metaverse’s planned launch, as well as the launch of the new Shiba.io website.

The main points from Shiba’s announcement include:

• The Shiba.io website will be the hub of this immersive online environment and the main website for the project going forward.

• 100,595 virtual parcels of land in the Shib Metaverse will be sold in stages.

• Virtual land can only be purchased with ETH and currently cannot use any SHIB related tokens.

• The Shib metaverse will use SHIB, LEASH and BONE as its native tokens.

• Holders of LEASH Tokens or Shiba Inu NFTs will be given priority to purchase virtual land.

• The Shib metaverse will launch its own stablecoin SHI.

• A game component will be included in the new metaverse.

• Holders of virtual land will receive passive income, collect in-game resources and other rewards.

While originally none of these plans had a specific start date, the announcement says the new Shiba.io website will be up and running soon so users can start locking up their assets. Hours after Shiba announced the metaverse, Shiba Inu’s Twitter account posted that it had over three million followers. And according to CoinMarketCap, as of this writing, SHIB is priced at $0.00002485, down 4.57%. Which means it has lost more than 70% since hitting an all-time high of $0.00008845 in October 2021.

Price predictions

CoinMarketCap, the world’s largest cryptocurrency data site, is testing a new feature that uses its tens of thousands of community members to predict future cryptocurrency prices, which has achieved a 70% success rate since its crowdsourced prediction feature launched last October. And with Shiba Inu announcing the launch of its metaverse, CoinMarketCap predicts that the price of SHIB could rise by more than 40% by the end of April. Indeed, it seems reasonable to believe that the launch of the metaverse venture will have some positive price effects for the Shiba Inu token eco-system, as long as it keeps the community on board with its plans going forward. The importance of this aspect is underlined in the Shib team’s belief that the land sale will benefit the community in the longer term. “The benefits are centered for the community to thrive and share a truly exceptional environment while being delivered a rewarding experience,” it confirmed, which includes “awarding users to have a personal space in which they will be able to build and manage their own projects.”

Despite the price volatility, the Shiba Inu development team is trying to turn the project into a legitimate, stable cryptocurrency that offers value and utility to rival Dogecoin. Additionally, programmers at Shiba Inu are continuing to work on launching Shiba’s own blockchain, ‘Shibarium’, a layer 2 system for SHIB. The rest of the SHIB ecosystem coins such as LEASH and BONE are expected to play a role later in the process, including purchasing lands in the metaverse.

The risks ahead

While CoinMarketCap predicts a 40% increase in SHIB prices this month, the bigger concern is with whether they will be able to carry out their metaverse plans and launch their proprietary blockchain. As shown in the recent $600 hack of Axie Infinity, creating your own blockchain also comes with its own security risks. Justin Kan, founder of Twitch and more recently Fractal, is quoted as saying the lesson from Axie’s hack is to be careful when using your own infrastructure. “If you go and make your own infrastructure … [security] is something to be wary of, to be honest,” Kan told The Information’s Pasricha. “I’m not saying you should never do it” but there’s a risk and reward tradeoff. There’s a lesson there for the Shiba Inu developer team which they would be wise to take note of, especially considering the risk to their supportive #ShibArmy community.