A new breakdown of the largest altcoin holdings among Ethereum whales reveals a surge in the popularity of Shiba Inu (
According to WhaleStats – which analyzes the holdings and activity of whales on various blockchains – the 5,000 largest Ethereum () whales on record now hold a staggering 50,905,707,716,073 SHIB worth $735,034,573.
This makes SHIB the second-largest altcoin holding among Ethereum whales, right behind the stablecoin Tether (USDT).
The rise of SHIB is also reflected in the growing number of large whale transactions of the memecoin in recent weeks.
One such transfer happened over the weekend, when an anonymous whale 3,216,307,240,798 SHIB worth $47.6 million to an unidentified wallet.
? ? 3,216,307,240,798 (47,671,033 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallethttps://t.co/skiRABtAZP
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 4, 2023
SHIB’s explosive rise in popularity has been, in part, triggered by extended hype on the project’s plans to launch a layer-2 protocol known as Shibarium.
The protocol will be similar to scaling solutions like Polygon () in functionality, allowing people to launch custom tokens on top of Shiba Inu, with gas fees paid for in Bone ShibaSwap (
The project’s launch date is uncertain, although developers have said they expect to release a beta version in the near future.
SHIB has outperformed its main rival Dogecoin () in the last month. SHIB has soared by 67% in the last 30 days, while Dogecoin (DOGE) is up by 23%.
SHIB is priced at $0.00001413 at time of publishing, down 1.8% in the last 24-hours.
