“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?” - Alex, A Clockwork Orange

And an extreme pleasure it is. Not only do we get the news of a real-world application for SHIB with the Welly’s partnership, but we also see a nice little bump up a few days later. Almost like little Alex and his Droogs knew this would happen all those years ago (sorry, deep cut; amazing movie if you haven’t seen it though). It’s been no secret to most of us for a while now that SHIB is going places. This time, last year, we were debating on if ShibaSwap would be operational before 2022 and whether SHIB actually had a use case. All of that seems silly now. What started as a meme of a meme has now quickly become the gold standard in altcoin projects. No other project is making moves like SHIB is. Sure, there are some projects that already have governance, or a play-to-earn game, or their own L2 chain, or their own exchange, or their own specific brand of NFTs, or a metaverse, BUT none of those projects has all of these things combined. And now SHIB is becoming a brand.

Some took the news that SHIB is becoming a full partner with an unknown Italian burger franchise as a negative. They feel like Welly’s isn’t a large enough name to associate with. To me, that’s McDumb. Why would SHIB partner with a larger chain if the entire point of DeFi is less centralization? Signing with a Wendy’s or a Taco Bell would have been huge but, it also would have gone against the core tenants of the SHIB project itself. Welly’s was the right move because they’re still small enough to pivot to a DeFi business model. I wrote last week about the future use of NFTs and, now look, here’s a prime example of what I meant. Welly’s will be utilizing Shibarium NFT’s, as well as using Shibarium to sell food for SHIB ecosystem tokens. Having widgets like NowPayments and Flexa are great for using SHIB to buy goods and services from the big boys but, having a place where the primary crypto used in its sales is SHIB is a much bigger deal than anyone is giving it credit for.

I wrote a Reddit post regarding the Wellys news the day it was announced. In it, I described how having the SHIB brand as a mascot will immediately give Welly’s brand power and make it popular everywhere there are SHIB holders. I also said that SHIB would benefit and become a household name if the food at Welly’s is as good as it looked in the pictures they showed in the Medium articles. Fast forward a few days and, lo and behold, Welly’s announces franchise opportunities on Twitter. I thought it might take a few years for Welly’s to grow but, because of the enthusiasm of the SHIB community, their original plans to open a few restaurants over the next couple years has now turned into a massive growth opportunity and a chance to go global.

Fast forward to yesterday and ANOTHER major announcement comes from the dev team about LANDS. LANDS will be virtual property you can buy in the upcoming Shiberse metaverse. Within one week there has been multiple announcements about the project that we had no prior knowledge of. That’s the magic of SHIB. There’s always something new coming. ShibaSwap 2.0, Shibarium, and ShibaNet are the three things we were expecting, and we haven’t needed an update on them because there’s always a new part of the project ready to disrupt and change the game.

The point is, were only in February and SHIB is making all other projects look like the same ol “I have a use case, bleh” plebs they’ve always been. (Just kidding, those tokens are cool too. You know what I mean though). If this is the “just the beginning”, I think my head might explode before we reach the end.

There’s one thing that needs to be considered, though. As many people as we have holding SHIB in non-custodial wallets, we have another part of the community that still sticks to centralized authorities. Part of the problem is that SHIB attracts new investors like no other. Because of that, many don’t realize the actual DeFi aspect of crypto investing. So, with that in mind (and because of one other factor you’ll read about below), I’ve decided to write a beginner's guide to investing in DeFi. I realize I probably could have started with this in the first issue but, ce la vie. In this issue will cover different types of exchanges and wallets. In next week’s I’ll cover types of tokens and their uses. Eventually I will hopefully have put together enough information that when new investors start pouring in, and they will, there will be a useful tool for bringing them up to speed on this project we all call our own. Getting the community to adopt Shibarium will be paramount; and these smaller announcements are just ensuring that adoption happens.

We’ll also take a look at a new project that is set to launch on ShibaSwap 2.0. It’s a new project, unrelated to the SHIB ecosystem, with a token that’s less than a month old but, it’s one of two that Shytoshi mentioned in a recent article. There’s also links to all the news that happened this week at the bottom of this page, including the Welly’s and LANDS announcements. As with every recent issue, there’s also a list of questions needing answers regarding the upcoming launch of Shibarium.

As one Welly’s french fry said to the other, “Stay salty my friends”.

-u/siflbabyshifero

ShibaSwap guide and previous issues:

SHIB Ecosystem Weekly Update: Shiba In-dex

Weekly Analytics 01/17/2022