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Looking back at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no asset class more stable than the stock market when it came to creating wealth for investors. Although stocks do have years of decline, in the long run, the average annual return of stocks easily exceeds that of gold, oil, real estate and bonds.

But in recent years, cryptocurrency has surpassed the market many times. Although the two giants of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and Ethereum often get all the glory, the current buzz belongs to the meme coin Shiba (CRYPTO: SHIB).

The Shiba Inu dog breed is the inspiration behind the super popular Shiba Inu coin. Image source: Getty Images.

Taking into account the intraday price of $0.00008841 on October 27, the SHIB token has risen by 17,335,194% since its debut 15 months ago. In other words, at the intraday price on October 27, an investment of $10 on the first day of SHIB (August 1, 2020) would be worth approximately $1.73 million.

How can an inconspicuous token bounce more than 17,300,000% in a little over a year? The catalysts, in no particular order, are decomposed as follows:

Of course, the biggest question is, "What's next for SHIB?"

If history has a say, the answer is a steep hairstyle.

The fact is that nothing is guaranteed in the investment field-the same is true for cryptocurrencies. But more often, history rhymes. That said, history can provide clues about what will happen next in the stock, or in this case a very popular cryptocurrency.

When I look back at other payment-focused tokens that have enjoyed significant increases in the past, a clear trend emerged. In a relatively short period of time, they all lost more than 90% of their value.

For example, the token XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) previously known as Ripple soared from less than one cent (0.0054 USD) on March 1, 2017 to its closing price of 3.3778 USD on January 7, 2018. This is 62,452% of gains in 10 months and a week. Then, for momentum-driven XRP, everything fell apart. Between profit-taking and legal issues, the XRP token dropped all the way to $0.1396 on March 12, 2020. In a little over 26 months, the value of XRP has shrunk by 96%. It is far from alone.

Litecoin (CRYPTO:LTC) has been considered the silver version of the Bitcoin gold standard for a long time, but it caught fire within 30 months. Between May 18, 2015 and December 18, 2017, the token value of Litecoin increased by 24,613%. In some cases, it took about 55 years for the benchmark S&P 500 index to obtain similar numbers. But by December 14, 2018 (that is, one year later), the price of the LTC token may be 93% lower than its highest closing price.

Even Nano (CRYPTO:NANO), which is one of my favorite low-key cryptocurrencies, has experienced a similar struggle. On March 10, 2017, cryptocurrency investors could have bought Nano tokens for 0.0073 USD (less than a cent!). As of January 2, 2018, their price was $33.7023. In less than 10 months, revenue increased by 461,575%. But by March 16, 2020, Nano found that it had returned to the price of $0.3527 per token, a 99% drop from its high.

In addition, Bitcoin has also experienced more than 80% corrections in the past ten years.

History is very clear, and it is almost impossible to change the upward space of life in a short period of time. If history rhymes or repeats itself, SHIB tokens will lose at least 90% in the coming weeks, months, and even years.

Then again, history is not the only problem facing Shiba Inu.

As I pointed out earlier, according to data from the online business directory Cryptwerk, SHIB tokens are only accepted by about 100 almost unknown online merchants. Despite being in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Shiba Inu has little use outside of cryptocurrency exchanges.

It is also disturbing that the cryptocurrency exchange and ecosystem Coinbase pointed out on October 29 that the median holding time (drums) of SHIB on its platform is only 11 days. This tells us that Shiba Inu's transactions are mainly driven by sentiment or momentum, and few investors really believe in the long-term payment potential of SHIB. Presumably, this makes Shiba Inu's token price prone to sharp fluctuations.

Perhaps the most problematic is that Shiba Inu does not provide any competitive advantage. For long-term use, Shiba Inu needs to stand out in some way. However, its processing time, network capacity, and transaction fees are not worth mentioning.

It is impossible to predict exactly when the momentum of SHIB will fade. However, guided by history, this huge growth will not continue, which is almost taken for granted.

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