Final days of October, 2021. We find ourselves in the middle of a SHIB historic price increase. The public shows a great interest, commitment, and excitement in SHIB’s potential.
Major news coverage, social media trends that continue to broadcast the ecosystem in multiple countries, and over all, an incredible market volume level that no one expected.
All this, accompanied by the narrative that SHIB is not just a meme token anymore, its evolution, and future use-case have now gone mainstream in the world of DeFi and cryptocurrencies. Together, as the community grows in numbers, yet now with even the factor of influential people sharing their thoughts, and feedback about it. The Flippening occurred, it’s real, we did it #ShibArmy.
But suddenly, at our best moment, our most notorious trending All Time High, and without notice, the supply of the token changed.
Now, before you panic while reading this article, let me share some news: This change is not relevant by now. It had its impact, and at this moment the new value is distributed to the market exchanges.
Needless to say, this leave a community with a question that needs to be answered:
How can this happen? How is it possible that the most popular token in the world at that moment, which was also so close to the very peak, gets affected by a change so fundamental, so important? Why did it happen, and who’s behind such a process.
Decentralization and Golden sources.
Everyone trusts CoinMarketCap. It’s a go to for so many. CoinMarketCap is the world’s most-referenced price-tracking website for crypto assets. Let’s make mention that it’s owned by Binance as well, and furthermore, due to their impact and standard in crypto’s price tracking action and supply, even etherscan.io, uses it as a reference for information for the likes of the current circulating supply of a token.
In general practice, and in essence, investors rarely, if ever, doubt CoinMarketCap.
It is effectively the golden source standard for trackability, just in the heart of Crypto! We as investors, and crypto-evangelists live with that very settlement of confidence, because we are used to it, but let me clarify for everyone, and make a strong statement, this is not decentralization. How can we have a golden source, in a time where everyone accepts that oracles are a necessity to trade fairly in these highly volatile markets?
Up to now, probably no one has ever really questioned the need of a decentralized system to track the actual supply of tokens. Up to now, I didn’t even thought about this as a neccesity. But here you should know some instrumental facts:
- No one ever asked the SHIB team what was the actual supply.
- When the original value, more than 5 months ago, appeared in CoinMarketCap, no one, not even us, questioned it. Like everyone else, we believed CoinMarketCap’s acknowledgement.
- We trusted that value, as everyone else in the world. But this has to change, because trust has to reside in the blockchain, not in a single golden source or single company.
- Some people have mentioned that SHIB should update its API. But SHIB has no API, and never had before.
Now, how the initial value was determined?
Checking on the Wayback Machine, we can find here that the supply had no info whatsoever
https://web.archive.org/web/20210421202656/https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/shiba-inu/
and then, we see it
https://web.archive.org/web/20210508174644/https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/shiba-inu/
I found references to this value as earlier as June 6 in our old Telegram group.
Where does this value come from? Not from us certainly. How is this calculated then vs how it is calculated now? We can not respond to that since we have never been responsible to keep this value in one way or another.
So, what should the SHIB team do?
These are things that needs to be answered, so here I go:
We made a wrong assumption: We trusted blindly without checking ourselves. Can you really blame us? For sure you will find people that say YES and others NO. But in fact, we like to think about decentralization constantly, and we are working on methods that should increase decentralization in the SHIB ecosystem, and we overlooked this fact. Here’s what we are doing due to such:
- We are changing our view towards the issue of supply.
- We would totally support a community effort to take charge of this issue. But, how will the market react?
(Hopefully, we hope that this starts with the common acknowledgement that something needs to change)
We heard that this change in the reported supply was due to changes in their platform. Is this pathway towards a decentralized goal, or the community is the one will have to take charge to avoid these situations?
If we don’t do it as a community, we will be inviting other actors to enter the discussion. Actors whose interests are totally opposed to decentralization.
I have personally something to do too: I -shibinformer- should acknowledge a mistake on my part. In a hurry to answer, I threw an incorrect message to the public. And for this, I want to send my apology to the developer of shiba-calculator.online, a community member just trying to help. Something in which he totally succeded. Without thinking too much about that at the moment, I generated attention to his site and account, and I feel like this could been interpreted by some like he was responsible for keeping the token supply updated. That was incorrect!
In fact the site does not update the supply, and just reflected statically the supply that we all knew in CoinMarketCap; but again, the same acknowledgement and problem, tracing CoinMarketCap’s supply figures to determine an amount to broadcast publicly.
Conclusion
We don’t need golden sources. We need reliable systems, where no fat fingers can make a mess or stop the progress of the ShibArmy. We can not go by the usual, and trust just by familiarity.
This has been a lesson not just for SHIBA but for the whole crypto community. I would also expect solutions to appear from the community eventually.
What needs to happen?
Since the community wants answers, we should know about the change in calculations performed by CMC, because this might give what the community needs, an explanation for this change on a token whose total supply simple can not go up. The confusion and the claims of some people accusing the SHIB team of increasing the supply is totally misguided, and needs to be cleared by CoinMarketCap themselves, or their parent company, Binance.
$SHIB INFORMER 