Shiba Inu Coin’s (SHIB) price soared by 14.5% in 20 minutes last night after Elon Musk tweeted a text-based image of a dog holding a rocket.
At 11:19 PM BST – one minute before Musk’s tweet - SHIB’s price was $0.00002523. It then peaked at $0.00002875 at 11:39 PM, before dropping to $0.0000273 at the time of writing.
While Musk did not elaborate on his tweet, the rocket emoji is a common representation of the phrase ‘to the moon’, used by hodlers to celebrate or predict their coin’s dramatic price rise.
Elon Musk Tweets, But Was It About SHIB?
There is no guarantee Musk was tweeting about SHIB. In fact, Elon Musk has never publicly acknowledged SHIB, with most of his memecoin-based tweets relating to Dogecoin.
However, his previous tweets relating to Shiba Inu, the dog breed that inspires DOGE and SHIB, have sparked SHIB price rises in the past, most recently on October 4.
Doge saw a 2.5% increase in the same time period as SHIB’s 14.5% growth, but it may now have had a delayed response to Musk’s tweet. It grew 6% between 9:44 AM BST and 10:14 AM BST and is up 9.29% in the past 24 hours. SHIB is up 6.67% in the past 24 hours.
Looking at Musk’s replies paints a solid representation of the current memecoin landscape. Various Doge-related tokens, including Baby Doge Coin, Mini Doge, and Floki Inu promoted their own cryptocurrencies below.
Meanwhile, followers expressed confusion as to what Musk’s cryptic tweet was about.
Shiba Inu Coin’s latest price spike comes as the Shiba ecosystem continues its expansion into new crypto-territory. Shiba released its new Shiboshi NFT collection last week, although gas fee issues hampered the launch.
Read More: Shibarium Blockchain: Shiba Inu Coin Layer-2 Is The Next Step For SHIB