• Whales have been accumulating Shiba Inu (SHIB) on non-exchange addresses for the past two months, signaling that the institutional investors are confident of the coin’s long-term prospects.
• Technical indicators reveal that there has been consistent capital inflow into the Shiba Inu ecosystem, even as other meme coins fail to attract institutional investors.

Shiba Inu has traded sideways since the turn of the year, gaining a measly 1.18% in the past four weeks. However, this dip in volatility seems to be working for institutional investors who have continued to accumulate SHIB en masse. In the past two months, Shiba Inu whales have accumulated over 4 trillion tokens and have slowed down on sales in a long-term bet on the second-largest meme coin.

SHIB trades at $0.000009172 at press time, gaining 3.8% in the past day. The price has remained range-bound over the past month, where it has changed by a mere 1%.

This prolonged accumulation has attracted deep-pocketed investors who are scooping up SHIB with zeal. Since mid-December, the holdings of SHIB whales have increased from 493.42 trillion to 497.11 trillion, data from Santiment shows.

As the whales scooped up the tokens, the amount of SHIB held on exchanges has also decreased drastically since December 1st, as the graph below shows. A rising amount of tokens on exchange wallets indicates holders are preparing to dump their holdings while the reverse is true.

The decrease in exchange-held tokens contrasts with the sharp spike in today’s trading volume, which almost doubled to hit $146 million.

Earlier this week, the Shiba Inu whales moved 1.6 trillion tokens in quick succession from Binance, Coinbase and other top exchanges to unknown addresses, with volume shooting up by 514%.

The interest in Shiba Inu by whales contrasts sharply with its rival, Dogecoin. As CNF reported today, Dogecoin added over 400,000 new wallets in just two weeks, but the vast majority of these new accounts only held less than 10 DOGE, with the whales’ balance barely changing over that time.

What’s next for SHIB?

As the whales play their part in providing strong support for SHIB, the overall community is pulling its weight too. According to one data platform, the activity on the Shibarium network has surged in recent days. On February 7, new accounts jumped by a staggering 621% to send the total number of accounts on the Layer 2 network to over 63,300. The total addresses now stand at 1.35 million, while the total transactions are now north of 338 million.

This growth in Shbarium adoption is critical if Shiba Inu is to become more than a mere meme coin. Dogecoin has taken this path, barely making any progress on the adoption front and relying on the star power of Elon Musk for charity, but even this is wearing out, as evidenced by the lack of institutional investor interest.

With Shibarium, Shiba Inu can become a rich ecosystem with its own dApps, DeFi platforms, NFTs, DEXes and more.