ETH's price rose above $4,400 this morning as the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency, which is also based on the Ethereum blockchain, enjoyed a massive surge in popularity.
Coinbase puts the price of ETH at $4,429 at the time of writing. That's a month-over-month increase of approximately 58 percent, and according to CoinDesk, it's at least partly because Ethereum burned more tokens than it emitted in the last 24 hours.
Enter Shiba Inu. It's a memecoin that uses the same mascot as Dogecoin—which has also experienced a significant increase in price and popularity—and is based on Ethereum. Coinbase data currently puts Shiba Inu's price at $0.00007170.
Don't let the number of zeroes following that decimal point fool you: Shiba Inu is massive. Its price has risen by about 930 percent month-over-month (93,062,286.75 percent year-over-year) and it currently has a $39.9 billion market cap.
What does that have to do with the price of ETH? Well, CoinDesk cited Tokenview data showing that "Ethereum produced 15,109.34 ETH and burned 16,710.2 ETH in the past 24 hours," which means the net supply of ETH fell by about 1,600.
ETH's scarcity, Bitcoin's recent price increases, and an optimistic crypto market all pushed the price of ETH to a record high. Shiba Inu was the third-largest contributor to ETH's burn rate, CoinDesk said, so it can take some credit for this bump. Ruff.
