As the crypto bull market rolls around once more, top meme coins Dogecoin and Shiba Inu have started vying for the position of best performer once again. The year 2024, despite only being three months in, has already been incredibly interesting in this regard as both meme coins rally to new yearly highs.
Dogecoin Vs. Shiba Inu Price Performance
Taking the year 2024 into account, it seems that Shiba Inu is finally winning the top meme coin battle against Dogecoin. A comparison of prices at the start of the year and now shows that Dogecoin has performed poorly compared to Shiba Inu.
To put this in perspective, the Shiba Inu price started out the year around $0.000009 and then surged more than 400% in March to $0.000044. The price has since retraced since this and returned to the $0.000027 level where it is currently trading now, still a more than 150% increase from where it started the year.
In comparison, the Dogecoin price started 2024 at around $0.08 and then rallied to $0.2 in March. This is less than a 300% increase in the same time period in comparison to SHIB. Then, just like SHIB, the DOGE price has retraced some of its gains and is now trading at $0.15, which is around a 100% increase from where it began the year.
However, when it comes to holding up during a downtrend, DOGE has proven to be the better performer. This is because while Shiba Inu has seen its price fall around 50% from its March highs, the DOGE price has only seen a 25% decline. This suggests that Shiba Inu is the much more volatile option, thus making it more likely to move up faster than Dogecoin. But it also means that the price of SHIB is more likely to crash rapidly compared to the more stable DOGE.
The Rivalry Between SHIB And DOGE
The rivalry between Shiba Inu and Dogecoin goes right back to the launch of SHIB in 2020. SHIB adopted the Shiba Inu dog which is the face of Dogecoin, and after the DOGE price rallied in 2021 due to billionaire Elon Musk’s influencer, SHIB’s position as the “Dogecoin killer” became more prominent.
This piggybacking of the already popular Shiba Inu dog breed made popular by DOGE, as well as a very clever marketing campaign of sending half the total supply to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who proceeded to burn the majority of it, propelled the SHIB price and brought it into the limelight.
Even now, this rivalry continues to wax stronger, with the Shiba Inu team threatening to dethrone Dogecoin as the leading meme coin. In an X post, the Shiba Inu team boasted that the end was close for Dogecoin. The post hinted at major updates coming for the SHIB ecosystem that will help to solidify its position as the leading meme coin.
Nevertheless, Dogecoin remains the leading meme coin for now with a market cap of $22.8 billion. This puts it ahead of Shiba Inu which is the second-largest meme coin with a market cap of $16 billion.