Manny Pacquiao Turns to Shiba Inu to Help His Foundation

Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquiao has announced that his charitable foundation will use meme token Shiba Inu’s network for fundraising. 

In a Wednesday announcement, the world-champion-turned-politician said that the Manny Pacquiao Foundation would implement Shiba Inu’s Layer 2 blockchain Shibarium into the foundation’s operations. 

The Manny Pacquiao Foundation is a non-profit run by the former fighter. 

Shibarium is a layer-2 network backed by SHIB tokens which runs on Ethereum. Launched in August, the idea is that the network will make it quicker and cheaper to build and transact on Ethereum, much like layer-2 networks that have come before it, such as Arbitrum and Optimism.

“The Manny Pacquiao Foundation will use Shibarium to better optimize, streamline, and record its activities, including tracking its fundraising and donations, distributing funds, and managing other resources, while externally providing even greater transparency concerning its social good efforts across the globe,” a Wednesday release said. 

It added that the Foundation was no stranger to crypto and had been accepting SHIB on its website since 2021. 

Manny Pacquiao Foundation executive director Jon Sisson added that “Shibarium will allow us to continue this good work while scaling up operations to help millions more.”

Shiba Inu—which trades as SHIB—is a meme coin and the 19th biggest digital asset by market cap. It was launched in 2020 to compete with Dogecoin (DOGE) and has since gained a huge following. The asset runs on Ethereum and is notoriously volatile. 

Following the news about the Pacquiao foundation, the token rose a modest 1.5% to trade at $0.00000862, according to CoinGecko.

With its new blockchain, the SHIB ecosystem is hoping to become a go-to network for running DeFi apps and move beyond its meme coin label.