Shiba Inu (SHIB) is an ERC-20 token called “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building” by its founder known as Ryoshi. Launched as a meme token in 2020, it became the biggest hype in the spring of 2021. Such popularity has been caused in part by the growing awareness about the existence of the meme coins (SHIB is dubbed “Dogecoin killer”) and in large part by Elon Musk’s tweets. Its team is also inspired by the WallStreetBets subreddit going up against the Wall Street giants as an example of the decentralized collective effort. The principles described in Shiba Inu Woof Paper are: building something from zero, forging a community without preexisting connections, and, of course, the love of Shiba Inu dogs. 

SHIB is a part of the growing ecosystem being developed by the same team. There are also the LEASH and BONE tokens within the same ecosystem (and more tokens are in the works); the big project of the summer of 2021 is a decentralized exchange called ShibaSwap where those tokens are listed. Another known project is the Shiba Artist Incubator, which encourages artists in the community to create Shiba Inu NFTs. There are also other far-reaching plans, such as building SHIB’s own level 2 blockchain Shibarium, which in the long run should help with potential scalability issues and also may influence Shiba Inu's price in the future.