Shiba Inu

What it is

Shiba Inu, ticker SHIB, is a meme coin: a token whose origin is a joke rather than a technical breakthrough. It was created in August 2020 by an anonymous person or group using the name Ryoshi, borrowing the same Japanese dog breed that fronts Dogecoin and pitching itself as the “Dogecoin killer”. One quadrillion tokens were minted at launch, a deliberately absurd number, which is why prices are quoted in fractions of a penny. The memorable fact: Ryoshi sent half the entire supply, unasked, to Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin, gambling that he would never touch it.

How it works

SHIB began as a standard token on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning it has no network of its own to secure and simply rides on Ethereum’s. Its value rests on community, scarcity arithmetic and attention rather than cash flows, which is true of every meme coin. The project has since built more around the token. Shibarium, launched in 2023, is a layer 2 network, a faster and cheaper lane that settles back to Ethereum, and it includes an automatic burn mechanism, destroying a portion of SHIB as the network is used so that supply falls over time. Companion tokens such as BONE, used for Shibarium fees, sit alongside SHIB in the ecosystem.

The story so far

The decisive moment came in May 2021. Buterin burned about 410 trillion of the tokens he had been given, removing roughly 40 per cent of the supply forever, and donated a large part of the remainder to charity, including a Covid relief fund in India. Later that year SHIB reached its all-time high during the meme coin mania, briefly ranking among the largest crypto assets in the world. The years since have been a long descent from that peak, softened by a community, self-styled the Shib Army, that has kept building: Shibarium, burn campaigns and a steady stream of ecosystem projects.

Where it stands

On 13 October 2026 at 01:46 UTC, SHIB traded at $0.00000515, with a market value of about $3.04 billion and a rank of 38 among the assets tracked by CoinGecko. Worth watching are the pace of Shibarium activity and burning, and whether meme coins as a class hold their place in the market. Our crypto explainers hub offers grounding on how the wider crypto market works.