Dogecoin Spinoffs: All Bark & No Bite or Something More??

Throughout late 2020 and early 2021, meme digital asset Dogecoin experienced some truly unprecedented bullish price action and fuelled the development of an entirely novel ecosystem in the ever-changing world of cryptocurrency.

Dogecoin is a digital asset just like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but it’s quite a different animal when compared with these two. In fact, while Bitcoin and Ethereum were both designed with some incredibly strong, cutting-edge fundamentals at heart, Dogecoin instead simply appeared on the horizon as a light-hearted joke for crypto enthusiasts.

Despite its rather unusual origins, Dogecoin has absolutely exploded in popularity in 2021 and, at the time of writing, the quintessential meme coin stands in 7th place among the top 10 most valuable crypto assets, boasting a market capitalisation of over $40 billion.

The Dogecoin saga first began when three very well-established individuals in the music and tech scenes respectively all of a sudden decided to take an interest in the meme coin. This interest was indeed so powerful that it ignited a 3-month long, hype-driven rally that shot the token up from approximately $0.05, in early February, to an all-time-high of $0.73, in early May 2021.

These aforementioned individuals are old school rapper Snoop Dogg, Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, and Tesla CEO and professional memer Elon Musk.

Snoop Dogg, instead, tweeted at Musk with a parody of one of his albums. The words on the album cover were replaced with ‘Snoop Doge’ while the doge image covered the rapper’s face.

Some might argue that the recent charade surrounding meme coins has perhaps gone a bit too far and, to some extent, this thought process isn’t completely out of line. In fact, with so many projects out there striving to deliver some of the most leading-edge value propositions and aiming to enhance the development of the digital asset ecosystem as a whole, it is rather ironic that dog-centric meme coins were the ones to steal the show, even if for a short while.

In addition to this, it is also intriguing to witness the development of an entirely new Dogecoin-influenced ecosystem of similar meme coins, as well as a true, somewhat cultic craze spearheaded by tokens such as Shuba Inu, Baby Doge, Mini Shiba, Shiba BSC, Akita Inu, and so many more!

In this piece, we will be primarily introducing some of these Dogecoin spinoffs, analysing their price performance and discussing whether or not they are bringing something new to the table. So, without further ado, let’s get acquainted with some of these mighty meme coins, shall we?

Baby Doge

Baby Doge bills itself as the ‘Son of Doge’, and it’s hoping to feed off the hype that its meme father Dogecoin has garnered this year. As the cryptocurrency’s website has it: 

Baby Doge Coin has learned a few tricks and lessons from his meme father, Doge. A new crypto birthed by fans and members of the DogeCoin online community. Baby Doge seeks to impress his father by showing his new improved transaction speeds and adorableness. He is hyperdeflationary with an integrated smart staking system built in to reward you, so more baby doge coins are being automatically added to your wallet each transaction. BabyDogeCoin.com

Since its launch on June 1st 2021, Dogecoin’s perhaps more infantile version has been picking up steam, fans and some very respectable percentage gains along the way, mostly fuelled by hype. In fact, after the token launched, its price moved up by 1,000% in about two weeks, it reached a market capitalisation of $200 million in three and around 160,000 holders in four.

Baby Doge was created by fans and members of the Dogecoin community, and it shares much of the symbolism with Dogecoin, such as its name and dog logo, but apart from that it actually has nothing to do with its meme father from a technical standpoint.

Compared with Dogecoin, Baby Doge is not only a newer token, but it is also 10 times faster. It is furthermore very likely that the name choice was a marketing strategy for the coin to gain more traction and generate more attention, which it most definitely did.

In early July 2021, self-proclaimed ‘Dogefather’ Elon Musk tweeted about Baby Doge and helped jack up its price by as much as 130%.

Technically speaking, Baby Doge is a BEP-20 token and was developed on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Thus, in terms of design, Baby Doge shares similarities with Shiba Inu, another Dogecoin knockoff that was recently listed on the biggest U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase.

Part of Baby Doge’s mission is helping to save dogs in need, an endeavour that seems to be rather widespread across many of these dog-centric meme coins. On June 25th 2021, Baby Doge announced that it had donated $75,000 to a non-profit organisation called PawsWithCause.

 Image via Twitter 

Baby Doge is one of the many new cryptocurrencies that incentivise token holding by charging a transaction fee. In fact, when holders sell or trade their Baby Doge tokens they are subjected to a 10% fee. Out of this 10% transaction fee, 5% gets redistributed to the Baby Doge community and 5% is used to fund a liquidity pool made up of Baby Doge and BNB on PancakeSwap.

In essence, this incentivises people to HODL their Baby Doge and they are rewarded with more tokens for doing so every time a transaction occurs. However, it is important to note that this incentive strategy is by no means native to Baby Doge, as projects such as Safemoon, Elongate and Bonfire, for instance, had already incorporated it into their respective infrastructures way before Baby Doge did.

Tokenomics

Another thing that Baby Doge has in common with all the other meme coins is an incredibly large token supply and a very low price. Baby Doge began with 420 quadrillion tokens but developers are starting to destroy, or burn, its outrageous, near-infinite token supply and they’ve done this with over 125 quadrillion of them thus far.

As with the majority of these meme coins, price is hyper volatile and subject to unsustainable swings. For instance, the earliest recorded opening price for Baby Doge was of $0.000000000175 per token on June 9 2021. By June 24th, Baby Doge had hit its local all-time-high of $0.000000002014, representing a wild 1,000% ROI within the space of two weeks. By the next day, on June 25th, it had dropped to $0.000000000799, suffering a 60% loss.

At present, Baby Doge is trading at $0.000000001261 and has retraced approximately 93.68% from its all-time-high in early July.

‘Roadmap’

The Baby Doge Whitepaper and roadmap outline quite a few long-term objectives. For starters, Baby Doge aims to:

• Be listed on major crypto exchanges.
• Launch Baby Doge Swap.
• Offer credit card crypto payments on the Baby Doge Coin website.
• Create a wallet for holders to track their rewards.
• Launch Baby Doge NFTs.

The project also outlines some rather silly objectives, such as:

• ‘Adding way more memes’.
• Giving away a Tesla when Baby Doge Coin reaches a $250 million market cap.
• Carving a Baby Doge into a mountain at a $100 billion market cap.
• Forming a Baby Doge religion at a $500 billion market cap.

While its primary objectives could be viewed as somewhat reasonable, the irony of its latter ones transpire the truly innate meme-like nature of the project. Thus, Baby Doge is a token that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it could perhaps perform relatively well if crypto were to experience another meme season or if ‘Dogefather’ Elon Musk all of a sudden decided to continue promoting it.

Shiba Inu

Dogecoin may very well be the ultimate pack leader of crypto meme coins but, in recent times, another Shiba-inspired token has come to life on the blockchain. We are of course referring to the wildly successful Shiba Inu (SHIB) coin.

Shiba Inu acts as both an ERC-20 and BEP-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain as well as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and, throughout 2021, it has been making waves as an alternative investment to Dogecoin.

Shiba Inu started trading on the Uniswap DEX slightly over a year ago and it has ever since experienced some truly explosive price action. At the time of writing, SHIB is trading at approximately $0.000007342 and is down around 80% from its all-time-high which it hit on May 10th 2021, but it’s up over 452,000% since its inception on July 31st 2020.

According to data on CoinMarketCap, Shiba Inu has actually outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of ROI, which is actually pretty wild for a token that seemingly came out of nowhere. While still well short of Dogecoin’s market capitalisation, Shiba Inu has experienced even crazier gains than its older sibling Doge.

In fact, since its inception, Dogecoin has put in a very respectable 335,502.22% ROI but Shiba, on the other hand, ultimately comes out on top with its jaw-dropping 456,396.59% ROI.

Once again, Shiba Inu shares much of the symbolism with Dogecoin, in particular with reference to the dog logo. In terms of infrastructure and functionality, the Shiba Inu ‘Woofpaper’ (memes!) states that the SHIB token acts as an ‘experiment in decentralised spontaneous community building’ and that it essentially should be considered the real trailblazer in the crypto meme movement.

Tokenomics

A total of 1 quadrillion SHIB tokens were minted and Shiba currently has a circulating supply of 394,796.00 billion SHIB. Just like with the majority of these meme coins, Shiba Inu’s maximum supply is absolutely enormous which consequently means that, from where we stand today, the potential upside could be slightly inhibited and capped by its large number of existing tokens. Yet again, you never know what the ‘Dogefather’ might be thinking, though!

Mini Shiba Token

In a similar fashion to the way we have Baby Doge for Dogecoin, Mini Shiba deems itself the ‘Son of Shiba Inu’ and takes direct inspiration from the symbolism, aesthetic and market status of its meme father Shiba and grandfather Dogecoin.

The legend says that Mini Shiba is the son of Shiba Inu.. He was the runt of the litter and is now lost and has been fending for himself against the perilous dangers of the world. What Mini Shiba lacks in size he makes up for in fearlessness and heart. Join our community and help us bring him to the Moon so he can reunite with his Father. Mini Shiba Whitepaper

Mini Shiba’s official website states that the token is being developed by a strong team of crypto experts looking to deliver on the promise of long-term scalability, sustainability and innovation. Moreover, the team believes that Shiba Inu constitutes ‘the best breed in the micro to mid-cap cryptocurrency space’ and states that Mini Shiba represents the natural evolutionary step forward in the Shiba Inu ecosystem (these meme coins are just fantastic!).

According to its ‘roadmap’, Mini Shiba will also be launching its own Decentralised Exchange (DEX), incorporating an automated liquidity and trading pool with its own NFT marketplace. Mini Shiba furthermore appears to be deeply influenced by the DeFi ecosystem in that it plans to develop liquidity provision (LP) and yield farming structures for Mini Shiba token holders.

To simplify the process of purchasing BEP-20 tokens, Mini Shiba will feature a fiat gateway via the Binance API to allow quicker and easier transactions. This will not only support Mini Shiba but all BEP-20 tokens, giving everyone easy access to the Binance Smart Chain.

Tokenomics

Mini Shiba is a BEP-20 token running on the Binance Smart Chain with a total supply of 1,000,000,000,000 Mini Shiba tokens. Mini Shiba incorporates a transaction fee mechanism similar to that of Baby Doge, charging a 12% transaction buy fee and an 18% sell fee and redistributing the accrued fees across the community of Mini Shiba holders.

Currently, the Mini Shiba token is trading at $0.00000001027 and is down approximately 65% from its all-time-high of $0.00000003 which it hit on August 1st 2021.

While it’s still billions away from the market capitalisation of its meme father Shiba Inu, Mini Shiba could perhaps start gaining some traction if Shiba suddenly went on another of its galactic runs. In fact, despite the two tokens not being technically related, if SHIB were to turn bullish, Mini Shiba could hypothetically feed off of some of its momentum and appreciate in value.

Shiba BSC

Shiba BSC is a Shiba Inu spinoff primarily focused on Non-Fungible Tokens and NFT cards. The Shiba BSC token is built on the Binance Smart Chain, hence its name, is community-driven and was fairly launched. According to data on CoinMarketCap, Shiba BSC is an incredibly young token that first hit the market in late May 2021.

The Shiba BSC Lightpaper describes the project as a decentralised community experiment looking to develop intricate yield farming opportunities for Shiba BSC holders as well as NFT card gaming systems. The project furthermore seeks to improve the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem by providing a blockchain toolbox made up of oracles and different Software Development Kits (SDKs).

As a utility token in the Shiba BSC ecosystem, users will pay with Shiba BSC for the services provided in the blockchain toolbox, with 6% of every payment being burnt forever. 6% will be burnt for deflation and out of this percentage, 3% of each transaction will be destined to the Shiba BSC liquidity pool and the other 3% will be allocated to all token holders’ addresses proportionally.

According to its ‘roadmap’, Shiba BSC is currently focusing on delivering its NFT marketplace and advancing its NFT-based gaming solutions. On May 20th 2021, Shiba BSC launched its first NFT game called ‘Lucky Pet’, a pet-based NFT card game allowing users to win prizes and trade their non-fungible tokens with other players.

Tokenomics

At the time of writing, Shiba BSC is trading at $0.000000009695 and it has retraced rather heavily from its all-time-high of $0.000000083638 which it hit on May 29th 2021. Shiba BSC is currently down 87% from its late May all-time high.

In pure tokenomic terms, Shiba BSC has a maximum supply of 1 quadrillion and around 70% of the tokens have already been burnt for deflation. Shiba BSC has no pre-mining, no previous private or public sales, and the liquidity pool is locked permanently. Shiba BSC enjoys a fully diluted market capitalisation of around $9.8 million, which is actually pretty low.

However, it is important to note that despite the incredibly low market cap of Shiba BSC and the potential upside that it might experience, this token still remains a meme coin at heart, meaning that investors should exercise some form of due diligence and implement a sustained level of risk management prior to deploying capital to Shiba BSC or similar assets.

Akita Inu

Akita Inu is yet another Shiba Inu and Dogecoin spinoff claiming to be a meme-based, 100% community-driven crypto experiment. According to its official website, Akita Inu claims that 1/2 the tokens have been sent to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the other half were locked in a Uniswap pool and the keys burnt.

Originally a meme token without a team nor a project, acting as Dogecoin’s and Shiba Inu's smaller brother, Akita Inu now has a strong community of 45,000+ holders, a dedicated team known as Polarfox Labs, and many moderators to help federate the community.

The team’s goal is to bridge Akita Inu to Avalanche for project governance and to empower the Akita community. 

According to Akita.Network, three projects involving the token are currently being developed and these entail:

• The DreamSwap exchange on Ethereum, which will allow holders to stake their AKITA with other dog tokens.
• An Avalanche to Ethereum bridge, which will let users send their AKITA from Ethereum to AVAX and vice-versa.
• The Polarfox decentralized exchange (DEX), the main project of the team, on the Avalanche blockchain.

The Polarfox DEX will involve Akita Inu in a variety of ways, including:

• A certain amount of AKITA tokens will be required to access the pre-sale of PFX (Polarfox) tokens.
• The AKITA governance token, known as gAKITA, will be earned there.
• The AKITA governance will be implemented on Polarfox.

Based on these aforementioned elements, Akita actually seems to be rather dedicated to developing a strong DeFi community as well as a functioning product. It is complex, however, to determine whether or not it will succeed in its endeavours and if it will manage to effectively bridge to the AVAX blockchain.

Furthermore, Akita Inu seeks to bring together like-minded people looking to invest in a common experience. Through interactions within a decentralised and anonymous social media platform, AKITA visionaries and holders will have access to vendors and organisations that have been chosen by its own members and benefactors.

Tokenomics

Akita Inu is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. In pure tokenomic terms, Akita has a maximum supply of 95,000,000,000,000 tokens, which is of course an astounding amount. The AKITA token is currently trading at $0.000001084 and enjoys a fully diluted market capitalisation of over $100 million.

Akita Inu experienced true parabolic momentum in mid-May 2021, moving by a factor of 17x within the space of 4 days, from May 7th to May 11th. The token has ever since aggressively retraced by about 95% from its last all-time-high and seems to have bottomed out for quite some time now. That being said, if the project effectively manages to migrate and bridge to the AVAX blockchain, this would most likely generate some attention and potentially create some demand for the token.

As it stands today, however, if Akita Inu is to succeed it will either require some fundamental developments from the dev team or it will need to drive hype via social media or capture the attention of some high-end entity with a massive following, such as the ‘Dogefather’.

Conclusion

Over the course of the last year, Dogecoin has been on an absolute moon mission and has enjoyed some hyper bullish momentum. While it is technically a crypto asset just like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot or Cardano, Dogecoin fundamentally came to life as a light-hearted joke for the digital asset community.

Despite its rather unusual origins, Dogecoin has exploded in popularity in 2021 and, at the time of writing, the quintessential meme coin stands in 7th place among the top 10 most valuable crypto assets, boasting a market capitalisation of over $40 billion.

In the post-Dogecoin ecosystem, however, a variety of similar meme coins have come to life on the blockchain, with these being Baby Doge, Shiba Inu, Mini Shiba, Shiba BSC, Akita Inu, and a plethora of other truly obscure ones. The initial hype that drove Dogecoin to a multi-billion dollar evaluation recently migrated to a parallel group of other Dogecoin-influenced, meme-like tokens, allowing a few of them to absolutely skyrocket in value.

However, despite the incredibly bullish price action experienced by this new complex of tokens, it is of utmost importance to emphasise that these crypto assets were fundamentally designed and essentially architected as memes, and it should therefore be noted that these assets could potentially expose investors to some truly unnecessary risks.

One thing is for certain though, that this new set of Doge-induced meme coins has opened up a whole new ecosystem in the intricate, ever-evolving digital asset space and has shed light on a completely alternative, fun, playful and engaging side of crypto.