The story of Shiba Inu (SHIB), crypto’s best-performer of the year, still boggles the mind — even after multiple retellings. Just 12 months ago, the price of one SHIB token had ten zeros in front of it: $0.000000000063 on volume of $682.58, according to CoinGecko. By late October of this year, six of those zeros had gone and Shiba Inu had flippened Dogecoin to become the largest dog-themed token in the world, a top-ten cryptocurrency worth around $47 billion. Despite dropping almost 40% from that all-time high, SHIB still sits at a market cap of almost $29 billion — making it almost 350 times more valuable than our contender, Koinos Network (KOIN). Koinos Network has been the best-performer of the week on the Cointelegraph Markets Pro data and intelligence platform, where the proprietary VORTECS™ Score served up a hugely bullish series of 90+ scores over the last two weeks. Following those scores, KOIN soared from a previous high of around $0.22 to a recent high-water mark of $0.95 — still comfortably below a $100 million market cap. What do these two projects have in common? Almost nothing… except their strong performances in the markets. So for crypto investors who can’t decide between canine memecoins and layer-1 blockchain platforms… here’s a tongue-in-cheek analysis of their comparative strengths. Technology Koinos is a foundational, or layer-1, smart contract blockchain platform that aims to deliver a variety of technical innovations. Firstly, it’s designed to be modular — meaning that it should be more easily upgradeable than current blockchains, and could potentially eliminate hard forks. It is also built to be feeless, which the team claims will help onboard many more people to blockchain-based decentralized applications. And it has universal language support, a feature that may help more developers deploy those applications without learning a new skillset. It’s currently operating in the testnet phase. Shiba Inu has virtually no technical features that distinguish it from other memecoins, and its use-cases are essentially restricted to trading. Winner: Koinos Community Shiba Inu has over 1.9 million followers on Twitter; a Reddit page with 425,000 members; and almost a million active wallets. Its followers are among the busiest in crypto and Cointelegraph can hardly publish an article on social media these days without a host of SHIB shillers leaping into the comments. The community is engaged, active... in fact downright rabid in their enthusiasm for all things Shiba Inu. Koinos has precisely 1,500 followers on Twitter at the time of writing, and its Discord channel mainly contains arcane discussions on microservice architecture. Winner: Shiba Inu (by a mile) Team Koinos is being developed by the core team that previously worked on the STEEM blockchain, and who resigned en masse when that project was ‘acquired’ by Tron founder Justin Sun. Shiba Inu’s creator, Ryoshi (which is Japanese for ‘fisherman’) is a pseudonymous developer who insists that he, she, or they are not in charge of anything. Marketing appears to be a strong suit, however. Winner: Koinos Market Cap / Upside Potential Koinos has a market cap of just over $83 million at the time of writing. Its entire supply of 99.5 million tokens is already in circulation, all of which were distributed during a ‘fair mining’ period during which anyone with a computer could mine KOIN ERC-20 tokens. Shiba Inu famously has a total supply of a quadrillion tokens, of which almost 550 tillion are in circulation. With a market cap of almost $29 billion, it is currently the world’s 11th-largest cryptocurrency. Upside potential is hard to judge, but Koinos is seeking to join the ranks of layer-1 platforms like Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Polkadot, four of the world’s top tokens by market cap with a joint value of almost $750 billion. If KOIN was to attain just 1% of Ethereum’s market cap, it would need to be worth $5.55 billion — in other words, it would have to multiply 6,687x from its current price. With no natural peers besides Dogecoin (sitting one place ahead of it at $34 billion in market capitalization) Shiba Inu's most aspirational rival might be Bitcoin, with a market cap of $1.226 trillion. SHIB is already at over 2.3% of Bitcoin’s value, which appears to limit its potential upside. Indeed it might be argued that SHIB has already peaked.