Shiba Inu Expands Ecosystem with SOU NFT for Community Support

• Shiba Inu has launched Shib Owes You (SOU) NFT to support users with donations, payouts and some occasional rewards.
• SHIB has lost over 20% of its value in the past 30 days as the memecoin market loses investor interest.

NFTs once had all the hype in crypto, and celebrities were forking out millions of dollars to own a piece of the trendy assets. That hype has long since dissipated. However, Shiba Inu is still betting on it to revive its memecoin project after the devastating September bridge exploit, which we reported on.

The project took to X to announce Shib Owes You (SOU), an onchain NFT it claims to have developed as a good faith effort to support all the users impacted by the attack. It will issue payouts, donations and occasional rewards via the NFT, which users can split, merge or trade on marketplaces.

On its website, the project says that users who hold the NFT “will be able to claim payouts and rewards when released to recover your lost funds through SOU.” After connecting a wallet, the dashboard then checks if the user was a victim of the September 12 attack, and issues the SOU NFT that represents the tokens lost.

The initiative was not well received, with users seeing through the hollow gesture. One user commented, “…the optics on this is bad and shows how lazy everyone is. [You] all had nothing ready to go for the bridge victims and prob still have no leash v2 ready lmao. What a joke.”

Others slammed Shiba Inu for “tokenizing an apology and making debt liquid.”

As we recently reported, lead ambassador Shytoshi Kusama is now expanding beyond crypto to build an AI project, whose details he has kept closely guarded.

Shiba Inu, Dogecoin Struggle

While it has gradually shaken off the September bridge exploit, Shiba Inu has struggled on the price charts. It currently trades at $0.000006477 for a $3.81 billion market cap. While it traded sideways in the past day and even gained 7% in the past week, it’s down 22.6% in the past month.

On the derivatives market, open interest stands at $75 million, dipping slightly in the past day, data from CoinGlass shows. Alarmingly, CryptoQuant data revealed that there was a net flow of 182 billion SHIB tokens into exchanges on Monday, a 110% spike. Tokens moving to exchanges usually indicates that owners are looking to offload, and the selling pressure can weigh down on the price.

Dogecoin has not fared any better. The king of memecoins is changing hands around $0.1 and has also gained 8% in the past week. But just like SHIB, DOGE has lost 26.6% in the past 30 days. Over the weekend, it surged to hit a two-week high at $0.1163, but it has been on a downtrend since.

Pepe has been the best-performing major memecoin, gaining 23% over the past week to erase some of its losses from late January.