Shiba Inu Developers Floated a Dummy Token and Now Activist Traders Are Making It a Real Thing

Only in crypto can a token deemed worthless by its developers be resurrected as a serious project by an “army” of followers.

Calcium (CAL), a so-called dummy token created by the Shiba Inu team as part of a plan to renounce the bone (BONE) token contract, was issued by developers early on Friday. Over 50% of its supply was picked up by a bot shortly after going live as part of a planned move, and these tokens were live on the decentralized exchange (DEX) ShibaSwap.

But traders still purchased the tokens in hopes of making a quick buck, only to end up losing money. Some Shiba Inu community members warned against purchasing the tokens, as they were not intended to be an investable asset.

However, a cohort of community members who claim to have lost money used their CAL token holdings to create a new trading pair on Uniswap – with the token quickly finding over 1,400 holders in less than 12 hours. Participants in this new trading pair said they were “tired of Shiba Inu’s promises,” and intended to make Calcium a real project.

This led to prices of the original CAL token dropping 99% and had an on-chain liquidity of just $4,800 on ShibaSwap. But CAL tokens on the Uniswap DEX racked up $4 million in trading volumes and amassed $164,000 in liquidity.

Shiba Inu developers said in a post last week that they would issue calcium tokens to renounce the contract ownership of bone (BONE), the governance tokens of the newly launched Shibarium blockchain.

In crypto circles, renouncing a smart contract means that the contract's creator will no longer have control over it – giving investors a sense of security as the contract can no longer be changed or updated, and is hence saved from possible manipulation by the contract creator.

“This token is being created only for a specific purpose to mint and renounce BONE,” Shiba Inu developers said. “Please do not trade this token as it will not have any future value or need.”

“If someone is selling this please consider this a scam,” developer Kaal Dhairya wrote at the time.

Crypto project, however, doesn’t need a developer’s endorsement to work. Community members can rally around any token, seed liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and gather outside developers to work on use cases.

“People bought, added lp, and created a TeleGram chat which then turned it into a movement against the $SHIB team because of their recent actions against the community and ecosystem,” @1BlockChainKing, a vocal member of the Calcium token community, tweeted.

Never a dull day in crypto land.