Forget Shiba Inu: Electric Capital Says Polkadot Is Hot in 2024

Meme coins like Shiba Inu (SHIB), Bonk Inu (BONK), and Pepe Coin (PEPE) are there for investors when a 45% gain in Bitcoin price (annualized, that’s like earning 540% ROI for a month) just isn’t a big or fast enough profit.

These coins have posted some truly degenerate levels of profit from commensurate levels of risk. Furthermore, they have on-ramped young investors to Bitcoin, the stock market, and global finance.

SHIB Gained 26% in Feb (BTC Gained 45%)

Shiba Inu has made enormous strides to transform from an L2 meme coin to a full-fledged Web 3.0 ecosystem. The Shibarium provides SHIB holders a way to swap, yield, lend, borrow, govern, leverage, limit, and build with their dog-themed ERC20.

As a result of the developers’ and communities’ efforts, even though SHIB price under-performed BTC in February, daily active transactions are surging. Meanwhile, the network has “burned” 41% of the SHIB supply in under a year. Devs added the burn feature in Apr. 2023.

SHIB was quick to pick up in the past few days, though, soaring in value in line with the rest of the meme coin market and performing better than BTC in March (so far).

And yet, Electric Capital is touting Polkadot’s DOT as a crypto to watch in the coming cycle.

Growth in Developers

Electric Capital, a Palo Alto venture capital firm for early-stage cryptocurrency companies, ran across a large number of DOT projects in compiling the company’s latest blockchain developer report.

Shiba Inu has a developer team, but the amount of development is still so early that the DeFi meme coin did not appear in the report. Meanwhile, the number of full-time developers devoted to the DOT ecosystem more than tripled in three years. Now, it has the third-largest army of full-time devs after Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Growth in developer and app activity on this Layer-1 Web 3.0 platform may not be reflected in Polkadot price, with BTC and ETH stealing the spotlight so far in 2024.

Polkadot (DOT) tokens gained 25% in average crypto exchange prices in February and gained a total of 32% in the past month according to CoinGecko.