Shiba Inu is basking in enormous popularity as the 14th-ranked token emerged as the top trending crypto on Turkey’s Google searches in the last 3 months.
The popular meme coin has even trounced crypto heavyweights like Ethereum [ETH], Cardano [ADA], and Solana. According to data from Google Trends, search results from Turkey citizens make up the major chunk of the market share, with a score of 100.
A value of 100 on Google Trends data indicates peak popularity for the asset in a particular region.
Additionally, Shiba Inu searches in Turkey over the past year have far outpaced those for the majority of other altcoins.
Other nations like North Macedonia, Nigeria, and Pakistan occupy the second, third, and fourth positions respectively. Surprisingly, the US has ranked fifth in Google searches for the asset.
A year before, Turkish Finance Minister Nureddin Nebati created a sensation when he held discussions with a key Shiba Inu influencer to explore the possibility of accepting SHIB as an alternate currency.
Although there was no mention of its acceptance as an official “legal tender,” SHIB has seen an increase in the adoption rate among citizens of Turkey as an alternate substitute for a store of value or a potential inflation hedge.
Shiba Inu Might Be A Good Inflation Hedge
The good news is that the Turkish government has seemingly softened its hardline opposition towards the meme token.
The nation is embattling a high inflation rate of 85.51 percent in October 2022, the highest inflation rate recorded during the provided time period.
Meanwhile, Shiba Inu’s project lead Shytoshi Kusama spilled details on upcoming projects in the meme token ecosystem and more importantly the estimated dates for the launch of the Shibarium mainnet.
According to Kusama, Shibarium might be deployed in “two to four months,” indicating that the community may expect to have access to the layer-2 scalability solution this year, much to the delight of the Shib army.
“We are moving faster than we did previously,” he added.
This comes amidst the stunning growth of SHIB wallets connected to the Shibarium beta, called Puppynet, which has skyrocketed by 10x, from 365,200 to 3,122,259 within a single day. The number of tokens deployed on Puppynet totals 71 now.