Shiba Inu has been exploding over the past couple weeks.

The meme coin has been growing steadily this year, but really blew up once it was listed on Coinbase, and is now one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

There is even a story of one investor, who invested $8,000 into SHIB early on, whose holdings are now worth over $5 BILLION dollars.

Obviously that’s an outlier (and an unrealized gain), but when someone makes a 7 million percent return-on-investment, it’s worth taking notice.

I have been laser-focused on crypto and the DeFi ecosystem since I began my crypto journey a few months back, learning everything I can about L1s, L2s, dexes, oracles, wallets, etc.

I’ve been following every crypto newsletter & YouTube channel I can get my hands on, and have made some decent gains in BTC & ETH with the latest upward movements of the crypto market.

And yet I completely missed out on SHIB.

It’s too late in the game to be FOMOing now, so the best thing to do is learn from the experience.

My lesson is this: although many meme coins won’t amount to anything, and a few are outright scams, memes have the potential to drive tremendous gains over a short time period. If enough people buy into something, it can create a movement that defies traditional investing wisdom.

2021 has been the year of meme investing, from AMC and GameStop to now Doge and Shiba Inu.

My takeaway from all this craziness is to not ignore memes completely, and pay attention when something seems to be gaining traction on Reddit. It could be worth investing modest amounts into tokens tif they have the potential to go to the moon (as long as they aren’t complete scams).

Although it seems somewhat silly to compare retail investing to venture capital, the model here is actually pretty similar: investing into multiple tokens with the expectation that most will fail, but where one winner can make up for all the losers.