The long-standing hierarchy among meme cryptocurrencies has been upended as Shiba Inu (SHIB) lost its position as the second-largest meme coin to the fast-rising MemeCore (M). Despite a modest 3% weekly gain, SHIB’s market capitalization slipped to approximately $3.7 billion, allowing M to reclaim the No. 2 spot with a cap of around $4.3 billion after a 25% price jump in a single day.
MemeCore’s rally appears linked to a community initiative called “No Cap(tion),” a contest offering USDT rewards for creative captions, announced on the project’s X account and running until May 7. However, caution is warranted: analysts like X user Noodles have labeled M a potential “ghost chain” with fewer than 10 wallets allegedly controlling the network, raising manipulation concerns. Moreover, M’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) has climbed to overbought territory near 75, historically a signal for an impending pullback.
While M’s surge may be short-lived, SHIB itself faces headwinds from on-chain data. The Shiba Inu ecosystem shows declining engagement on its layer-2 solution Shibarium, where daily transactions remain far below levels seen before a previous exploit. At the same time, exchange reserves have ballooned to approximately 81.7 trillion SHIB, following a 24-hour influx of over 429 billion tokens. Net flows rose more than 10%, with inflows outpacing outflows—a classic sign of distribution, not accumulation.
Technically, SHIB trades within a weak upward channel but faces formidable resistance between $0.0000064 and $0.0000066, where the 50 and 100 exponential moving averages converge. A failure to break this zone could push the price toward $0.0000060 or lower. While active addresses have ticked higher, that activity has not translated into dwindling exchange reserves, confirming that sell-side pressure dominates.
