Benzinga | Oct 27, 2021 12:17PM EDT

Ethereum Whale Buys 277B Tokens As Shiba Inu Nears Dogecoin's Market Cap

Popular meme coin Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) is now the 11th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap after an explosive rally in October that sent the coin soaring to new highs.

What Happened: Shiba Inu gained more than 600% over the past few weeks, hitting a fresh all-time high of $0.0000594 on Wednesday.

The coin continued to rally even as a selloff ensued in the wider crypto market, with Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) dropping by 6% and 4%, respectively, over the last 24 hours.

Shiba Inu's extended rally followed an $11.5-million purchase from an Ethereum whale who added 277 billion SHIB tokens to their position Tuesday.

According to data from WhaleStats, the transaction had a fee of $15. The whale now holds over 293 billion SHIB tokens worth $16.5 million.

At the time of writing, SHIB was trading at a price of $0.00005682 with a daily trading volume in excess of $19 billion.

Shiba Inu also proved resilient to Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk's revelation of owning "none" of the meme-based cryptocurrency. With a market cap of $21.8 billion, SHIB is less than a 50% price move away from overtaking its rival Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) by market cap.

$SHIB is less than a 50% move from flipping DOGE. https://t.co/KLPiMLyhFT

-- Hsaka (@HsakaTrades) October 27, 2021

"Pretty sure this has been one of the most hated rallies recently. Consensus was DOGE would see an encore and SHIB would fade away back into oblivion. I'd reckon positioning was also representative of that," commented crypto trader Hsaka Trades.

"This is also why you don't ruin the sanctity of a meme by formalizing it with a "DOGE foundation" and actually talking about the tech," he added.

Photo: Old Money on Unsplash.