The SHIBA INU WoofPaper has three reasons why their team created SHIB:
“We started from zero, with zero.”
“The brilliant minds behind Shib had never collaborated before.”
“We love Shiba Inu Dogs.”
In the beginning of May 2021, dog-meme tokens like Shiba Inu saw transaction volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
On May 13, Vitalik Buterin (who was given half of the token supply by the developers) announced that he was donating a large amount of these tokens to a fund helping India with COVID relief. The SHIBA developers had not anticipated Buterin selling his tokens, so the relief fund (as of May 18) will have to navigate how to sell the tokens to use the money on aid without preventing market shocks in the SHIB market. At the news of Buterin’s announcement, SHIB dropped 44%.