TL;DR Breakdown
- Burry rubbishes Shiba Inu as a pointless investment. He says there’s an oversupply of the token.
- Burry’s criticism comes in the wake of Shiba Inu registering massive gains.
Michael Burry of the ‘Big Short’ fame has rubbished the Shiba Inu (SHIB) cryptocurrency.
The Scion Asset Management fund manager says that the SHIB token is ‘pointless.’ This even after the token registered a 230 percent spike.
Burry was responding to Coinbase’s Twitter description of the token on Saturday. Coinbase painted SHIB as the Ethereum based token, angling to be Dogecoin’s (DOGE) alternative in their post.
Coimbase’s description went on to contrast SHIB and Bitcoin (BTC). It stressed BTC’s scarcity compared to SHIB’s abundance. Whereas BTC has a cap of 21 million coins, the latter has a lifetime supply of quadrillion coins.
Burry disputes SHIB circulating supply
It’s this description that the hedge manager took issue with. In a quick response, Burry dismissed the assertion that SHIB has quadrillion tokens only. In a tweet that he has since deleted, he suggested that SHIB’s spinoff exceeds the stated figure.
Burry’s contention is the SHIB’s figures. To him, the glut in its supply hinders its appreciation. This argument anchors his belief that buying into SHIB is pointless.
Burry’s tweet didn’t go down well with SHIB lovers. Many called him out on his statistics. They used Coinbase’s market figures to insist that the token’s circulating supply had dropped. From the initial quadrillion, it currently stands at 394.8 trillion.
Information from the token’s site seems to corroborate the SHIB lovers’ claims. The website acknowledges that the project began with the quadrillion coins.
Its founder locked half of them on Uniswap. He then burned the remaining coins on Ethereum. The website’s explanation firms up Coinbase’s number and discounts Burry’s.
It isn’t clear whether SHIB supporters’ rejoinder pushed him to delete his tweets. He seems to have deactivated his Twitter account as his activity has gone mum.
The big short
Saturday isn’t the first time he has gone against the grain. He correctly pictured America’s real estate crisis of 2007 to 2010. At that time, market sentiment had projected continued growth in the sector.
Burry’s bet against that housing sector crash earned him huge returns and celebrity status. He starred in Michael Lewis’ book detailing those happenings, “The Big Short.” A movie going by the same title is also available.
He has openly shown skepticism about cryptocurrencies. To him, they are speculative and unwise to invest in them. He has, therefore, warned of an impending “mother of all crashes” taking place in the crypto sector.
The hedge fund guru likens BTC to a speculation-filled bubble running on leverage. Further, he has expressed concerns over the possibility of governments controlling cryptos. That said, he insists that he isn’t a BTC hater.
Burry has also courted controversy by deriding DOGE. He has referred to the coin’s all-time high as “a doge breakfast.” But credit to him, his investments in GameStop have grown investments in meme-stocks.
Shiba Inu is a cryptocurrency token created in August 2020. It’s one of the dog-themed meme coins that are popular among crypto lovers. Its popularity soared following Vitalik Buterin donating 50 Billion SHIB (over USD one billion at the time) to an Indian Covid-19 mitigation cause.
The last week has seen it soar by over 230 percent. At the time of writing, Coinbase indicates that it’s trading at $ 0.000028. It has a market cap of USD 10.3 billion.
