Shiba Inu – a cryptocurrency nicknamed “the dogecoin killer” has seen an exponential increase in futures trading volume in recent days. This comes amidst a parabolic price pump.

Traders Flooding Into Shiba Inu

According to data provided by IntoTheBlock, the meme coin’s futures trading volume began pumping on October 4th, up to $1.24B. This quickly spiraled up to above $5B today, for the first time ever.

It represents a 7700% increase in Shiba futures trading volume over the last 7 days. Most futures trading activity appears to be taking place on OKEx, followed by Huobi and Gate.

This figure dwarfs the still-massive price gains that Shiba has seen in the past few days. By October 5th, Shiba’s price had already risen 100% within days. This came after a whale purchased $44 million worth of the token in late September.

More recent data from CoinGecko shows total trading volume at $18B within the last twenty-four hours. It is also the fourth most-traded cryptocurrency right now behind Tether, Bitcoin, and Ethereum.

Shiba’s Surge and Elon’s Twitter

With its parabolic growth in recent days, Shiba Inu is actually starting to compete with Dogecoin for the top dog position. It now has one-third of the market cap size of its predecessor, ranked 18th on CoinGecko compared to Doge’s 10th.

The popularity of both tokens is undoubtedly related to Elon Musk’s praise of Dogecoin over the past year. In July, Elon even confirmed that some of his personal portfolio was in Doge. He even jokingly suggested that it could become the leading cryptocurrency.

More recently, Elon Musk revealed that he owns a real-life Shiba-Inu, and posted a picture of it to his Twitter a few days ago. The tweet garnered over 350k likes and could be part of the reason for Shiba’s excessive growth compared to Bitcoin and other cryptos this year.