TL:DR;

Shiba Inu is among the many double-digit price losers on a daily scale in the cryptocurrency space, dropping by 11% to under $0.000018. Although the entire market is covered in red, SHIBs losses could also be attributed to a major announcement by one of the team leaders.

SHIBUSD. Source: TradingView

Leader Steps Down

The announcement in question came from the projects well-known developer going by the X name Shytoshi Kusama. Although they have deleted many of the posts due to the controversy they stirred within the community, the overall message remains, which is titled short farewell.

Kusama indicated that they will step down from their active role within the team as the lead visionary, mostly because there is no more vision needed, only execution and communications.

Instead, Kusama will focus on becoming the global ambassador for Shiba Inu, aiming for mass adoption of the second-largest meme coin.

My job moving forward will be to guide projects interested in building with the 36 Chambers of Tech (rebranded to ShibOS simply because there are more than 36 now), and helping them implement global solutions at all levels with our technologies.

Moreover, I will search for partners that bring new technologies like AstraNova into our stack making it more robust. Finally, Ill tie up loose ends, and ensure the smooth transition to control by the DAOs. Using our various technologies and my unique and sometime unorthodox…

SHIBs Price Slide

As mentioned above, Kusamas statement led to some controversial responses, with many thanking them for their role, while others took aim at some of their projects failures.

Nevertheless, SHIBs price tumbled in the following hours from over $0.00002 to under $0.000018, thus going below a key support level. The reasons behind this decline could be attributed to the overall market crash, but some blamed it, at least to an extent, on Kusamas announcement.

Such statements coming from lead developers behind a token that relies a lot on its community usually trigger questionable responses and price drops.

On a bigger scale, SHIB is down by almost 30% since its yearly high of $0.000025 and by 45% since its cycle peak reached in early December at over $0.000033.