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Meme coins ruled the roost when it comes to the most-traded cryptocurrencies on Indian crypto exchanges over the past six months. Elon Musk-backed Dogecoin and its trending rival Shiba Inu surpassed the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum and MATIC, in terms of trading volume in India between April and October.
Overall trading volume
CoinSwitch Kuber told BusinessLine that over the past six months, Dogecoin contributed 13.76 per cent to its overall trading volume, followed by Ethereum at 6.06 per cent, Bitcoin at 6.04 per cent, Internet Computer at 5.08 per cent and Polygon’s MATIC at 4.52 per cent.
The cryptocurrency exchange has not listed Shiba Inu yet.
‘Most-popular coin’
Sharan Nair, Chief Business Officer, CoinSwitch Kuber, told BusinessLine: “Interestingly, Dogecoin, a popular cryptocurrency born out of a meme, has been on an uptrend, rallying in the last six months, even surpassing widely used cryptos, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“A flurry of tweets by global leaders, including Elon Musk, have helped strengthen Doge’s popularity. People are now starting to look at real-world utility of Dogecoin, leading to it becoming the most-popular coin in the last few months.”
Another top cryptocurrency exchange, WazirX, saw nearly 50 per cent of its trading volume coming in from ‘Dogecoin Killer’ Shiba Inu over the past one week.
On a Change.org petition demanding Shiba Inu to get listed on Robinhood, the cryptocurrency rallied on WazirX, clocking in transactions worth over $320 million over the last few days.
The meme coin founded in August 2020 by pseudonymous Ryoshi started seeing an uptick in global trading volumes when Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin burned nearly 90 per cent of his Shiba Inu holding worth over $6 billion, creating a dearth of supply in May. Apart from this, the other highest traded cryptocurrencies on WazirX included Bitcoin, Dogecoin, WRX (WazirX’s own token), MATIC and Ethereum. Between April and October, WazirX reported $27.12 billion worth of transactions. Shiba Inu started gaining momentum only in the past three to four months.
‘Great investment option’
Speaking on the popularity of Ethereum and Bitcoins, Nair added: “Along with hosting the Ether token, Ethereum is also leading innovation by being a foundation for a variety of applications such as decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), making it a great investment.
“Third in this list is Bitcoin, which, of course, continues to witness high volumes from investors due to it being the biggest and the most trusted crypto asset. Ethereum and Bitcoin’s technological superiority has been a key driver in its ever-growing popularity.”
Nischal Shetty, founder and CEO, WazirX, said: “The growth of Shiba Inu shows the power of being a community-driven project. In recent months, SHIB has been in the news for being listed on more exchanges, thereby increasing liquidity and access to the token.
“Adding to it, Vitalik Buterin also burned over $6 billion worth of SHIB tokens. Even though SHIB has been rallying for the past month, it has reached a new all-time-high price. On WazirX, SHIB has overtaken Bitcoin’s position as the top-traded token in the Indian rupee market this week. In the past 24 hours, over $320 million worth of SHIB has been traded on WazirX. This market movement has also caused WazirX to record an all-time-high 24-hour trading volume of over $560 million.”
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