The end is near for the IOTA side project Shimmer (SMR): Bitfinex and Bitpanda are discontinuing trading with SMR and there is no replacement for the crypto exchanges. Shimmer was the hope for IOTA for almost two years.
A bitter pill for IOTA: the side project Shimmer (SMR) is losing two key international trading venues this week, with the price curve plummeting by 61 percent over the last seven days. Bitfinex first announced the delisting of Shimmer on August 22 (Thursday), followed by Bitpanda on the same date. This means that Shimmer will only be traded on MEXC, a platform with a dubious reputation, outside of decentralized crypto exchanges.
With daily volumes of less than USD 4,000 with SMR, buying or selling Shimmer with just a few hundred US dollars is enough to have a noticeable impact on the price curve. Theoretically, Shimmer currently still has a market capitalization of a good 3 million US dollars, a paper value. When SMR made its stock market debut in the fall of 2022, temporary highs of over USD 0.15 were reached – today, SMR is trading at around USD 0.002, 98 percent away from its optimistic early days.
The IOTA Foundation launched Shimmer with a lot of advance praise. The network was intended to serve as a monetary testnet for the further development of IOTA. The integration of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) into Shimmer in September 2023 was supposed to be a breakthrough. However, an expensive advertising campaign for decentralized finance (DeFi) at Shimmer ultimately fizzled out, with the EVM having been ignored by the market for months.
In the IOTA community, the head of the foundation Dominik Schiener is often categorized as the personalized reason for Shimmer’s downfall. In fact, Schiener had publicly criticized SMR and had probably already written off the project internally at the beginning of the year. We last summarized how a swan song for Shimmer was looming here at the beginning of August.
Conclusion: Shimmer is a million-dollar grave – IOTA is still twitching
Shimmer investors have mostly lost money, totaling several tens of millions of US dollars. The IOTA Foundation is still financing the technological foundation for SMR. But IOTA itself is also in a deep crisis, with the price curve developing no momentum whatsoever in the death zone below USD 0.20. Here, too, the release of the EVM should provide a breath of fresh air, but the initiative needs “artificial respiration” with unclear chances of success for IOTA. Meanwhile, Schiener has proclaimed the motto “Sharia-compliant” for IOTA and is undauntedly hoping for a comeback. However, market trends suggest that interest in IOTA is waning – the former top 10 altcoin has long since dropped out of the top 100.
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