The two popular meme coins have mostly underperformed crypto majors in the past week.

Popular meme tokens dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) jumped some 9% in the past 24 hours, which suggests crypto traders are taking riskier bets on the back of bitcoin’s (BTC) outperformance.

Although there were no immediate catalysts for SHIB and DOGE tokens, the prices jumped on Thursday after social media platform X, formerly Twitter, revealed a video calling feature for premium users. This was likely a sign of irrational exuberance – as some traders have historically expected X to add DOGE as a payment option.

X CEO Elon Musk has often touted dogecoin as one of his favorite cryptocurrencies, even going as far as dedicating a segment to the meme coin during his appearance on the popular TV show “Saturday Night Live” in 2021. Twitter also briefly changed its logo to the dogecoin logo in April to spur a rally that gained as much as 37% for some traders.

Cumulative trading volumes for the tokens jumped to $1.2 billion on Thursday from $350 million on Monday, data shows.

Elsewhere, open interest in DOGE and SHIB futures spiked over 50% – indicating larger bets placed by traders who expect more volatility in the coming days.

Hopes of a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) helped bump bitcoin prices some 30% over the past week before retreating, with ether (ETH), solana (SOL) and xrp (XRP) adding as much as 40%.

DOGE and SHIB added just 15% in the same period. However, the tokens underperformed other majors despite being generally more volatile.

Meanwhile, a run-up in both these tokens has historically marked a local top for bitcoin and other major tokens. “Every time that the price of DOGE starts rising rapidly, there’s a market-wide crash following just moments later,” blockchain analytics firm Santiment said in a report last December.

Eight instances of price spikes of dogecoin marked the local top for bitcoin – and the crypto market – in 2022, Santiment noted in its report.

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Source: Vietnam Insider

A token meant for testing purposes wasn’t intended to be traded, yet some traders have pounced on the supposed opportunity.

Only in crypto can a token deemed worthless by its developers be resurrected as a serious project by an “army” of followers.

Calcium (CAL), a so-called dummy token created by the Shiba Inu team as part of a plan to renounce the bone (BONE) token contract, was issued by developers early on Friday. Over 50% of its supply was picked up by a bot shortly after going live as part of a planned move, and these tokens were live on the decentralized exchange (DEX) ShibaSwap.

But traders still purchased the tokens in hopes of making a quick buck, only to end up losing money. Some Shiba Inu community members warned against purchasing the tokens, as they were not intended to be an investable asset.

However, a cohort of community members who claim to have lost money used their CAL token holdings to create a new trading pair on Uniswap – with the token quickly finding over 1,400 holders in less than 12 hours. Participants in this new trading pair said they were “tired of Shiba Inu’s promises,” and intended to make Calcium a real project.

This led to prices of the original CAL token dropping 99% and had an on-chain liquidity of just $4,800 on ShibaSwap. But CAL tokens on the Uniswap DEX racked up $4 million in trading volumes and amassed $164,000 in liquidity.

How Calcium Came Into Play

Shiba Inu developers said in a post last week that they would issue calcium tokens to renounce the contract ownership of bone (BONE), the governance tokens of the newly launched Shibarium blockchain.

In crypto circles, renouncing a smart contract means that the contract’s creator will no longer have control over it – giving investors a sense of security as the contract can no longer be changed or updated, and is hence saved from possible manipulation by the contract creator.

“This token is being created only for a specific purpose to mint and renounce BONE,” Shiba Inu developers said. “Please do not trade this token as it will not have any future value or need.”

“If someone is selling this please consider this a scam,” developer Kaal Dhairya wrote at the time.

Crypto project, however, doesn’t need a developer’s endorsement to work. Community members can rally around any token, seed liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and gather outside developers to work on use cases.

“People bought, added lp, and created a TeleGram chat which then turned it into a movement against the $SHIB team because of their recent actions against the community and ecosystem,” @1BlockChainKing, a vocal member of the Calcium token community, tweeted.

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Test blocks on the network are processing as normal after developers blamed the earlier stoppage on unprecedented demand.

Shiba Inu developers are slowly working towards a Shibarium network reopening by monitoring validator data and transactions days after a much-hyped network launch was marred by network issues and a faulty bridge.

In a post early Tuesday, the project’s key developer, who goes by Shytoshi Kusama, said the network was “almost ready to reopen to the public” and had mechanisms in place to prevent an outage repeat.

“After two days of testing and tweaking parameters to achieve “ready” state Shibarium is now enhanced and optimized,” Kusama said. “As mentioned it is still in testing, but producing blocks.”

“Moreover, we have enabled a new monitoring system and additional fail-safes including rate limiting at the RPC level and auto server reset in case we get a huge level of traffic again,” he added.

Shibarium is an Ethereum layer-2 network that uses SHIB tokens as fees in what is part of a broader plan to position Shiba Inu as a serious blockchain project. It is said to have a focus on metaverse and gaming applications while finding use as a cheap settlement for DeFi applications built atop it.

A testing period for Shibarium saw significant success, with millions of wallets participating and conducting some 22 million transactions over a four-month period.

But last week’s launch quickly fizzled out. Transactions on the network were stalled for at least eleven hours shortly after going live, with millions of dollars stuck on a bridge, or a tool that transfers tokens between different networks. SHIB prices plunged 10% at the time.

Developers responded to the outage stating that “there was no bridge issue” and that the problem occurred following an unprecedented mass influx of transactions from users. They claimed servers failed as users overloaded the network with transactions – much higher than the handling capacity of those servers.

The network was later closed to the public and is set for a reopening now that these errors are supposed to be fixed. As such, developers are already allowing validators – or entities who provide computing resources to process network transactions – to start taking initial steps for the reopening.

“Tomorrow additional validators will go live, giving even more options for you to stake BONE for a share of the rewards,” Kusama wrote in Tuesday’s update. “Testing will wrap up, and we will prepare for public consumption once again.”

SHIB prices were down 4.3% in the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.

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Developers shared plans for an NFC-linked authentication service in a Thursday update.

Shiba Inu ecosystem developers are working on a service that can be used to link real-world assets to NFTs to help prove ownership as part of their Shibarium ecosystem rollout.

Shibarium is a planned layer 2 blockchain focused on metaverse and non-fungible token (NFT) applications that will use shiba inu (SHIB), bone (BONE) and leash (LEASE) tokens to operate. The blockchain is expected to go live later this year, the developers say.

In a Thursday update, lead developer Shytoshi Kusama shared that the so-termed “Shibacals: Authenticated Collectibles” will employ NFC chips to digitally authenticate physical items – which could boost the value of these collectibles. Near Field Communication allows devices to interact wirelessly over a very short distance.

For example, Shibacals can be used to generate a tag for a real-world product, such as a T-shirt, which is tied to a user’s NFT collection in a way that authenticates the owner of the T-shirt and the NFT as the same person. On resale, these tags can be verified on the blockchain so buyers can differentiate between original products and copies.

“The NFT craze is, in part, due to the verifiable ownership and scarcity that digital items on the blockchain offer,” Kusama explained in the update. “But, what about physical objects? As mass adoption unfolds (preferably on Shibarium), and scammers move from wallets to tangible items, how will we authenticate these items?”

Shibacals tags will not be limited to the Shibarium ecosystem and could be used to verify products on any blockchain, according to the article.

Shiba Inu ecosystem tokens jumped on Wednesday following the update. SHIB surged 11% to post the biggest gains among major tokens, while BONE and LEASH jumped 9% and 5.5% respectively, CoinGecko data shows.

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Floki prices rallied on Sunday amid a bitcoin-led market push and bets on the token’s “China narrative.”

Floki (FLOKI) spiked over 10% on Sunday and saw its highest trading volumes in over three weeks as traders bet on the tokens amid a China-focused push for its Valhalla metaverse game.

Trading volumes for the tokens, which are fashioned after the Shiba Inu dog breed, jumped to over $60 million, up from last week’s $25 million average. The spike comes as ads for its Floki game featured in some Chinese sporting tournaments. This could have attracted some speculators who hypothesized that the move might attract new traders from China.

In a tweet, Floki developers said they saw an influx of Chinese-based community members on their social media groups.

Floki previously said it was targeting China in its latest push toward attracting more users for its Valhalla game, as previously reported. The game’s content and technical documents will be available in both traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese and are specifically targeted toward the Chinese gaming market, developers added at the time.

The “China narrative” has caught on among some on Crypto Twitter ahead of lax laws for retail trading in Hong Kong, driving up prices of some Asia-focused tokens, such as conflux (CFX) in the past few weeks.

Starting June 1, Hong Kong will allow traders to invest in some tokens, such as bitcoin, ether and solana, on regulated exchanges in the country. Traders are not allowed to hold any stablecoins, but the move has fuelled sentiment that wealthy Chinese speculators could soon plough money into the crypto markets.

“While most major economies are expected to slow down this year, the Chinese economy is projected to grow strongly,” said Floki core developer @100bviking in a Twitter message to CoinDesk. “J.P. Morgan projects a 4% GDP growth for China in 2023; that’s 2.5 times more than what is projected for the global economy and 4 times more than projected US economic growth.”

“This strong growth will spill over into crypto, especially with Hong Kong legalizing crypto in a few days’ time which is a sign of China warming up to crypto. There is a very high probability that China will drive the next crypto bull run,” @100bviking added.

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Source: Vietnam Insider