Edward Snowden Cautions Investors Against Dogecoin Clones Like Shiba Inu

Meme coins have been the year's biggest gainers and because they're not too expensive to invest in, retail investors do get lured into pumping hard-earned money into them. Now, whistleblower Edward Snowden has posted on Twitter warning people to be cau when investing in SHIB. The ex-National Security Agency (NSA) consultant cautioned all his followers to be careful before tossing all their eggs in the same basket of "a clone of Dog money" that claims to get everyone rich.

"Please carefully consider your odds of outsmarting a market that sold to you its stake in not even dog money but a CLONE of dog money," Snowden tweeted on early Sunday. In a subsequent reply, Snowden emphasised his concerns about retail investors "mortgaging the farm" to buy into these coins. "The problem is when they get emotionally manipulated into mortgaging the farm based on a meme's worth of understanding. If you want to drop some Happy Meals on lottery tickets, knock yourself out. But not the rent money" he said.

Although Snowden not once explicitly mentioned Shiba Inu (SHIB), SHIB fans we're the quickest to fight Snowden on his take since the whistleblowers comments come at the time when Shiba Inu tokens have skyrocketed in popularity.

The beginning of last week saw Shiba Inu rise by more than a whopping 826 percent in value, surpassing a market capitalisation of $38.5 billion (roughly Rs. 2,89,154 crore). By Friday, the Dogecoin-rival had rallied to overtake DOGE in valuation to become the 9th largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalisation.

Those taking on Snowden in the comments of his tweet tried to point SHIB-doubters to the ecosystem that the meme token has expanded to. This includes Shiboshi NFTs and ShibaSwap — Shiba Inu's own decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, and a proposed launch of a layer-2 protocol soon.

Many experts argue that the rally may not be sustainable — pointing to the greater fool theory, due to the coin's massive valuation. But on the flip side, the market capitalisation of SHIB is such that the meme coin is currently bigger than leading conglomerates in India.