Piin: The SHIB of Inscriptions

I. Introduction

After experiencing three bull and bear cycles, the meme coin sector has finally become one of the hot investment tracks favored by capital in the current bull market. SHIB, which rose more than 10,000 times in 2021, has also performed well in this bull run. SHIB’s market cap surged from around $5.5 billion in February 2024 to the current $14.7 billion, with a peak market cap of $20.9 billion, further demonstrating SHIB’s continued growth potential.

 

At the same time, in the much-watched Bitcoin inscription track of this bull market, the Piin inscription from the BRC20 series is considered the “SHIB of inscriptions.” What are the reasons behind this perception? This article will explain one by one.

 

“Those who understand history can, to some extent, foresee the future.” — Arnold J. Toynbee, British historian.

II. Key Factors Behind SHIB’s Success

Before exploring why Piin is seen as the “inscription version of SHIB,” let’s review the two core factors that drove SHIB’s success: a compelling narrative and a powerful community built by multi-level participants.

 

SHIB’s founder, Ryoshi, believed that Dogecoin’s success was not due to its technical superiority but rather its community strength and cultural influence. Therefore, he hoped to create a more decentralized, democratic, and innovative community to drive SHIB’s development beyond Dogecoin’s achievements (which is why SHIB is called the “Dogecoin killer”).

 

SHIB carefully cultivated its narrative and community building throughout its creation and development to achieve this goal.

 SHIB Has a Compelling Narrative

The dog image lays the groundwork for attracting newcomers.

“Dogs are man’s best friends.”

As the most common and beloved pets in human society, dogs hold a unique position in the hearts of the masses. By adopting Shiba Inu as its image and planning to fund dog rescue organizations through the Amazon charity, SHIB’s design resonates with the public, paving the way for attracting new users.

 

Cultural value proposition: A decentralized social experiment

The white paper states, “We are a decentralized, community-driven experiment.” As a purely community-driven token project, SHIB stands out from mainstream institution-led projects with its DAO-style operation, bringing it closer to the true vision of decentralization.

 

Additionally, with an initial supply of over one quadrillion tokens, SHIB’s price could remain extremely low, allowing users of different economic means to afford it and gain a sense of “token holding satisfaction.” This undoubtedly further expanded SHIB’s potential user base.

 

With these unique narratives, SHIB had the powerful potential to attract new inflows inside and outside the crypto world.

 

SHIB Has a Powerful Community Built by Multi-Level Participants

From the outset, the decentralized philosophy was highlighted.

To better realize the important decentralized philosophy, when Ryoshi created SHIB in August 2020, he issued one quadrillion SHIB tokens at once, with each SHIB costing approximately 0.0000000001 USD (with nine zeros after the decimal point). He injected half of the SHIB supply into the Uniswap v2 SHIB/ETH liquidity pool. He sent the liquidity provider tokens from that pool and the remaining half of the tokens to Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s founder).

By doing so, the SHIB project team completely lost control over SHIB, meaning they also had to purchase SHIB through the liquidity trading pool like ordinary traders to acquire the tokens.

 

Thus, SHIB took an important step in its decentralization process by eliminating the centralized role of the project team. This measure ensured SHIB’s fairness and transparency, achieving Ryoshi’s vision and making SHIB more innately superior in decentralization compared to Dogecoin, which has a project team. Ryoshi even deleted all tweets from his Twitter account after SHIB’s success to avoid exerting too much influence, embracing the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto, though this happened later.

 

Building the SHIB community and recruiting volunteers

From August 2020 to January 2021, according to the SHIB official archive’s records of Ryoshi’s words, Ryoshi recruited community volunteers (SHIB Army) during this period and worked with them to formulate SHIB’s development roadmap and community-building plans, laying the foundation for subsequent community development.

 

The GameStop short squeeze event boosted SHIB community development.

In January 2021, Wall Street witnessed a clash between retail investors and institutional giants in the “GameStop short squeeze event.” The event was initiated by the r/wallstreetbets forum community, which collectively targeted the hedge funds shorting GameStop. This ultimately forced them to buy GameStop stock en masse, triggering a price surge.

 

This event resonated strongly with retail investors in the crypto world. Driven by promotion within the SHIB community, many new users joined and rushed to buy SHIB, causing the token price to surge 10-fold in a single day. This wealth creation effect further bolstered SHIB’s community strength.

SHIB website update accelerated community building

On February 1, 2021, the SHIB website received a comprehensive professional redesign, clarifying SHIB’s decentralized social experiment positioning, announcing plans for the SHIBAswap ecosystem app, and disclosing all token distribution details.

 

Accompanied by direct promotion from community volunteers, SHIB’s price rose from 9 decimal places to 7, achieving a 100-fold increase and attracting more participants.

 

The tireless efforts of SHIB community volunteers and recognition from influential figures like Elon Musk drove SHIB’s continued price appreciation. This significant wealth creation effect attracted new investors, triggering a frenzy with ten major exchanges rushing to list SHIB within a day.

 

Subsequently, SHIB’s community grew to include hundreds of thousands of industry participants. Under this open and free community culture, SHIB entered the ecosystem application building phase, creating SHIB ecosystem apps like SHIBAswap, NFTs, and Layer 2, further cementing SHIB’s position as the second-largest meme coin by market cap. With the community’s and various forces’ support, SHIB even surpassed Dogecoin within a month, becoming the largest meme coin by market cap.

 

This community, composed of members from multiple circles, unleashed the harmonious, cooperative force that still gives SHIB tremendous explosive power today. As mentioned earlier, SHIB’s market cap has also significantly increased in this bull market.

SHIB’s tremendous success, especially its market cap once surpassing Dogecoin, which was born seven years earlier and had higher brand awareness, proves that SHIB founder Ryoshi’s vision was correct: By building a more decentralized, democratic, and innovative community, SHIB can surpass Dogecoin’s achievements. This fully demonstrates the powerful force of community consensus.

 

As a Bitcoin inscription token, Piin aims to promote SHIB’s decentralized community concept further and explore the limits of the consensus power from united forces across different circles.

 

III. Piin: The SHIB of Inscriptions

First, from a macro narrative perspective, Piin, as a Bitcoin inscription, has a compelling narrative advantage:

 

Firstly, inscriptions represent this bull market’s most important innovation in asset issuance forms. Historically, every revolution in asset issuance methods has the potential to spawn new massive wealth opportunities. Therefore, Bitcoin inscriptions have inherently greater potential than other asset issuance models.

 

Bitcoin is the blockchain with the strongest global consensus, and inscription assets issued on the Bitcoin chain are expected to capture a significant portion of the overflowing Bitcoin funds in this bull market, becoming one of the few assets that can outperform Bitcoin’s price appreciation. This is a compelling narrative.

 

Secondly, from a decentralization narrative perspective, Piin, as a Bitcoin inscription, naturally inherits the decentralized characteristics granted by the inscription technology at the technical level:

 

The BRC20 inscription system has only two roles: deployers and holders. The deployer is only responsible for deploying the inscription onto the Bitcoin chain and does not directly hold any tokens. After deployment, anyone can inscribe the inscription into their wallet by paying a small Bitcoin fee.

 

This openness and fairness are crucial for attracting user participation. It completely realizes the no-project-team-holding model, ensuring that all participants, whether retail, project teams, or institutions, start from the same line when acquiring tokens, ensuring a truly fair competitive environment.

 

Therefore, inscriptions are widely regarded as the most favorable form of asset issuance innovation for retail investors.

 

Most importantly, Piin represents a grassroots social movement that unites participants from various circles.

 

Piin was created by users from the Pi Network community. Pi Network is a crypto project where users can earn free Pi coins through mobile mining. For five years, the 55 million Pi miners have invested time and effort daily to build the Pi Network to ensure the Pi mainnet can launch on time.  

 

However, the Pi mainnet has yet to be released, preventing community members from trading their Pi coins. This has led to growing frustration among some users, who call for a united front to urge the Pi Network developers to act. Unfortunately, the mainnet launch has faced a series of delays, leaving users with no choice but to accept the situation.

 

When some Pi community users saw the BRC20 inscription as a fair opportunity for the wider public, they spontaneously used the inscription technology to deploy an inscription for the Pi community users—Piin.

 

Piin is a portmanteau of “Pi” and “inscription,” symbolizing the lasting imprint the Pi community has left on the Bitcoin network.

 

Echoing the total supply of the Pi network, Piin’s total issuance is set at 100 billion tokens. Using the BRC20 protocol to issue the Piin inscription aims to ensure all Piin tokens can be directly traded in the market without restrictions like those imposed on Pi coins by the project team.

 

Backed by this unique narrative and the potential support of 55 million Pi community users globally, Piin attracted significant attention on its deployment day and saw 100,000 inscriptions minted within a day.

 

Piin subsequently gained support and promotion from multiple Pi community Twitter accounts.

As Piin’s unique story became better understood, more retail investors became tired of institutional manipulation, and whales chose to join and assist in promoting Piin. Therefore, Piin’s core narrative is about unlocking the consensus potential of Pi Network’s 55 million users and has evolved into a grassroots movement uniting forces from various circles.

 

“When we are united, we can achieve the impossible.” —Helen Keller.

 

Piin Community Building and Development

With a combination of global Pi community users from various countries, crypto retail players, and others from multiple circles, Piin spontaneously formed a highly cohesive community.  

 

Piin’s community organically formed volunteer subgroups like foundations, promotion teams, design teams, and group-buying teams in its continuous development, reflecting its robust community building and high member participation​​. These self-built community contribution organizations not only promoted Piin’s adoption and understanding but also strengthened connections and collaboration among community members, providing a solid community foundation for Piin’s long-term development.

 

Promotion: Organizing conferences across channels to help newcomers build understanding

The Piin community organizes several Twitter Spaces conferences weekly, with an average of 1,000-2,000 attendees per conference and a peak of over 100,000 listeners—a level of engagement rarely seen in other inscriptions. During these conferences, many volunteers promote Piin’s philosophy and its story.

Community group-buying plan: Volunteer-driven, barrier-free participation approach

As mentioned earlier, one of the key factors behind SHIB’s success was its initial supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. This kept SHIB’s price extremely low, and combined with relatively low transaction fees, it facilitated easy entry for new users unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies.

 

While an individual SHIB token priced at $100 might have deterred newcomers from trying it, spending just $1 to purchase 100 million SHIB at minimal cost could attract those unfamiliar with crypto to give it a try.

 

However, due to the technical design of inscriptions, allowing individuals to purchase any desired quantity (like SHIB) freely is challenging. From the perspective of purchase flexibility, inscriptions lack SHIB’s advantage, which could discourage newcomers from trying and acquiring them.

 

Despite this transaction barrier, a peer-to-peer collaborative purchasing culture has organically emerged within the major Piin communities. The initiative aims to ensure users with limited funds or who just want to try can conveniently obtain their desired amount of Piin tokens.

 

Piin Community’s Achievements

Over 30,000 community members from countries worldwide

Currently, Piin has amassed an active global user community, with over 20,000 supporters worldwide and over 8,000 users contributing to the Chinese community. These domestic and international community members actively participate in discussions and promotion, injecting Piin with continuous vitality.  

 

 

 

Over 12,700 new Piin holding addresses in about five months

Under the influence of Piin’s spontaneously formed community consensus culture, Piin achieved remarkable results in just about five months. According to OkeyWeb3 market data, the number of Piin holding addresses has increased by over 12,700, a growth rate far exceeding other inscription projects, fully reflecting Piin’s wide acceptance and active participation within the community.

 

This impressive growth trajectory demonstrates Piin’s powerful community consensus cohesion and market recognition. It once again proves that when a project is rooted in the true vision of decentralization and gains widespread grassroots support, its inherent growth momentum is unstoppable.

 

Third largest trading volume among inscriptions

According to OkeyWeb3 market data, Piin’s total trading volume currently exceeds 60,000 inscriptions, ranking third in total inscription trading volume, behind only Sats and Rats, which were deployed about half a year earlier than Piin.  

More dispersed token-holding situation than most

As mentioned earlier, Piin aims to initiate a grassroots social movement that unites participants from various circles. Given this goal, the inherent openness of Bitcoin inscription technology allows us to observe that Piin’s holding addresses are far more dispersed than most other inscription projects.  

 

The total holdings of the top 10 addresses account for only 6.2%, a distribution that matches Piin’s community scale well. The on-chain data is highly authentic and credible, while the dispersed nature of the holding addresses aligns perfectly with the goal of initiating a grassroots public social practice movement.  

 

Piin’s market cap is severely undervalued.

Piin still has tremendous upside potential from the current market cap level compared to SHIB’s and the top inscription projects’ historical highs.

 

This potential becomes even more pronounced when combined with Piin’s unique user base, especially considering that Piin has the Pi community, a massive group with over 55 million users. This gives Piin unlimited room to shape a compelling core narrative and value proposition in the future.

 

Therefore, from this perspective, the current Piin project is clearly severely undervalued in the capital markets, and its investment value remains to be rediscovered and recognized.

IV. Conclusion

Over the past decade, the cryptocurrency market has experienced multiple explosive growth seasons, causing the values of early projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance Coin to skyrocket, leaving many investors who failed to position themselves in time feeling regretful.

 

The Dogecoin and SHIB crazes of 2021 and the rise of Ordinals inscriptions in 2023 have once again highlighted the importance of seizing opportunities in this emerging market, which is full of twists and turns but has unlimited potential.

 

Now, as a grassroots movement led by a decentralized community, will the values and vision embodied by Piin become the next new trend to capture the capital market’s attention and favor? Only time will tell.