ShibaSwap is the decentralized exchange of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) coin. Shiba Inu is a popular dog-themed meme coin that was inspired by the success of Dogecoin and has earned itself the title of “Dogecoin killer.” Shiba Inu recently [November 2021] managed to briefly surpass Dogecoin in market capitalization, partly thanks to its ShibaSwap exchange.
ShibaSwap enables users to provide liquidity and swap different tokens while earning its governance token BONE in the process. Users can also trade NFTs, so-called “Shibatoshis,” a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs related to the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Other functionalities include staking, swapping tokens, collecting rewards and checking portfolio analytics.
After burning half of its supply to Vitalik Buterin, who proceeded to donate his tokens to charity, the Shiba Inu community decided that SHIB would need to set itself apart from other meme coins and started working on ShibaSwap.
Since the founder of Shiba Inu is unknown, the same is true for ShibaSwap. The Shiba Inu community developed the exchange in order to increase the utility of the SHIB token. Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 by “Ryoshi,” a pseudonymous developer. Shiba Inu’s “Woofpaper” explains three reasons for the creation of Shiba Inu:
ShibaSwap is a fully functional decentralized exchange with all the functionality of other decentralized exchanges like UniSwap and PancakeSwap. The biggest difference is that all DeFi functions on ShibaSwap are dog-themed and named differently than they would be on a regular exchange.
For instance, providing liquidity is called “digging” and as a reward, liquidity providers receive ShibaSwap liquidity pool tokens (SSLP). Staking is titled “Bury,” and users can stake all three tokens SHIB, BONE, and LEASH for attractive yield. 33% of bone rewards from staking are available immediately, while the remaining 66% are locked up for six months. Users can also check their “Bonefolio” performance in the “Dogalytics.” “Woofing” returns is to swap SSLP tokens for BONE, the protocol’s governance token.
As of Oct. 30, 2021 , ShibaSwap has an impressive TVL of $452 million. It also offers two additional tokens to its SHIB coin. BONE is the exchange’s governance token with a total supply of 250 million tokens. BONE holders can propose and vote on changes to the Shiba protocol via its Doggy DAO. LEASH was originally launched as a rebase token, similar to an algorithmic stablecoin. It automatically increased and decreased in supply, while keeping its price pegged to another asset. In the case of LEASH, the price was supposed to track the price of Dogecoin at a rate of 1:1000. The protocol changed this and the price of LEASH is now allowed to float freely. Since there are only 107,647 LEASH, the token acts as a sort of store of value for the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
