Shiba Inu (SHIB)

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme coin launched in August 2020 by an anonymous creator using the name Ryoshi. Named after the Japanese dog breed made famous by the Doge meme, it began as a joke rival to Dogecoin (DOGE) and grew into one of the most widely traded altcoins, with a community that calls itself the "ShibArmy". It is used mainly for trading and speculation.

SHIB is not a coin with its own blockchain. It is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum Blockchain, and its ecosystem has added a decentralized exchange, two companion tokens called BONE and LEASH, and a separate network called Shibarium. No company issues or controls SHIB; development is led by community figures, most prominently a pseudonymous lead developer known as Shytoshi Kusama.

Imagine a fan club that printed a quadrillion raffle tickets for fun. Because there are so many, each ticket is worth a tiny fraction of a cent, so anyone can own millions of them for a few dollars. The tickets have no prize attached; their price depends only on how many people want them and how loudly they talk about them online.

The club also keeps tearing up tickets and throwing them away, which slowly shrinks the pile. Over time it has tried to give the tickets more to do, opening its own trading booth and building a side road next to a busy highway so members can move them more cheaply. Even so, most people who hold SHIB do so in the hope that more fans will join and lift the price.

Ryoshi created SHIB in August 2020 with a supply of one quadrillion tokens. Half was locked in a liquidity pool on Uniswap (UNI) so it could be traded at once, and the other half was sent to the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, a move meant to show that the team kept no large allocation. In May 2021 Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB to an Indian COVID-19 relief fund and sent about 410 trillion more to a dead address, destroying roughly 41 percent of the supply. The project's own exchange, ShibaSwap, opened in July 2021, and the token was listed on large exchanges such as Coinbase later that year. Ryoshi later stepped away from the project and deleted their public writings, leaving its direction to community developers. The decision to give half the supply to a well-known figure was unusual, and Buterin's choice to give much of it away rather than sell it shaped the token's early story.

Shibarium, a network built to make SHIB activity cheaper and faster, launched in August 2023, but its bridge to Ethereum failed within hours and had to be repaired. In September 2025 an attacker used a flash loan to borrow enough BONE to gain control of most of Shibarium's validators and drained an estimated $2.4 million from its bridge, according to early reports; developers paused the network and later planned user refunds.

SHIB has no mining or staking issuance. All tokens were created at launch, and the supply falls only through burning: sending tokens to a burn address from which they can never be spent. Community members, projects and Shibarium fees all contribute burns. The share of supply removed by a burn is:

Using Buterin's 2021 burn, the calculation is $410 \div 1{,}000 = 0.41$, or 41 percent of the one quadrillion supply, since 410 trillion is 410 thousandths of a quadrillion. By contrast, a burn of 1 billion SHIB today removes less than one hundred-thousandth of the remaining supply, which is why everyday burns, although widely publicized by the community, have only a small effect on tokenomics.

• Trading. Most SHIB activity is speculative trading on centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges.
• Ecosystem tokens. BONE is used for governance and as the fee token on Shibarium, while LEASH was created as a small-supply companion token.
• Payments. A handful of merchants and payment processors accept SHIB, usually converting it to dollars at once.

SHIB's market capitalization rose sharply during the 2021 meme-coin boom, briefly placing it among the ten largest crypto assets, and has swung widely since.

SHIB's price depends almost entirely on sentiment and social media rather than on cash flows or wide use. A large share of the supply sits in a small number of wallets, so moves by a few large holders can shift the market sharply in either direction. Shibarium's two bridge incidents raised doubts about the security of its add-on network, and the token's popularity has spawned many imitation coins, some used in pump-and-dump schemes. Holders also face the usual risks of scams, lost keys and exchange failures, and the token has no claim on any company, income or reserve that could support its value in a downturn.

• Shiba Inu official site
• Shiba Inu documentation