What Is Shiba Inu? SHIB, Shibarium and Burn Explained

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Shiba Inu is a memecoin on the Ethereum blockchain that launched in August 2020 as a tongue-in-cheek rival to Dogecoin and now supports a small ecosystem of its own. The token is called SHIB and follows the ERC-20 standard. Around it, a dedicated layer-2 blockchain called Shibarium, the ShibaSwap exchange and the side tokens BONE, LEASH and TREAT have emerged. Anyone asking what Shiba Inu is therefore has to separate two things: the coin, whose price runs almost entirely on sentiment, and the network around it, which has so far seen little use.

On November 5, 2026, one SHIB cost roughly €0.00000406, according to CoinGecko. Its market capitalisation stood at about €2.4 billion, enough for 37th place among all cryptocurrencies. That leaves the price a good 94 percent below its record high of October 2021. For investors in Germany, the story of the dog in the logo ultimately matters less than where you trade SHIB under MiCA rules, how you store it and when gains become tax-free. That is where this profile is heading.

Shiba Inu in a nutshell: memecoin, ERC-20 token and ecosystem

A memecoin is a cryptocurrency whose value derives mainly from an internet joke, a community and attention rather than from earnings or a business model. Shiba Inu belongs squarely in this group, alongside Dogecoin, Pepe and Bonk. cryptoticker's overview of meme tokens puts the category in context.

Technically, SHIB is an ERC-20 token, meaning a token built to the standard of the Ethereum network. It runs as a smart contract on Ethereum and has no blockchain of its own in the way Bitcoin does. Transfers therefore incur Ethereum fees, known as gas, which are paid in ETH. It was precisely this fee problem that Shibarium was later meant to solve.

The difference from Dogecoin matters. Dogecoin is a standalone proof-of-work network with miners. SHIB is not mined. The entire supply was created in one go at launch, and since then it can only shrink when tokens are burned.

Where does Shiba Inu come from? Ryoshi, Uniswap and half the supply for Vitalik Buterin

Behind Shiba Inu was an anonymous person or group using the pseudonym Ryoshi. In August 2020, the contract minted one quadrillion SHIB. Half of it went into a liquidity pool on the decentralised exchange Uniswap so that trading could begin at all. Ryoshi sent the other half, unsolicited, to the publicly known wallet of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The reasoning was that if the best-known developer in the industry held half the supply, there would be no founder able to quietly dump large amounts on the market. It played out differently than planned. In May 2021, after the first big price surge, Buterin sent most of his SHIB to an address nobody can access and donated further tokens to a Covid relief fund for India. Reports at the time put the value of that donation at around one billion dollars, though the fund raised considerably less when selling because the market could not absorb the volume.

Ryoshi withdrew from public view in 2022. Since then, the developer Shytoshi Kusama, also a pseudonym, has been regarded as the face of the project. For you, this means SHIB is backed by a loose team of developers and a community; there is no company with a registered office, a balance sheet or liability.

Shiba Inu supply and burn: how one quadrillion SHIB became 589 trillion

A burn is the permanent destruction of tokens by sending them to an address with no known private key. Whatever lands there can never be moved again. According to the Shibburn burn tracker, around 410.8 trillion SHIB have been burned to date. By far the largest share stems from Buterin's move in 2021.

That leaves about 589 trillion SHIB. This figure explains why the price carries so many zeros after the decimal point: even with a market capitalisation of several billion euros, each individual token is worth only a fraction of a cent. At this supply, a price of one euro would imply a valuation of 589 trillion euros, many times the size of the entire world economy. Without massive further burning, the question of whether SHIB will ever reach one euro is therefore settled by arithmetic.

Ongoing burns are tiny by comparison. In the seven days to November 5, Shibburn recorded around 77.5 million SHIB burned, worth a little over $350. Measured against circulating supply, that is a share in the range of hundred-thousandths of a percent. Our own recalculation of the burn rate in September reached the same conclusion: burning is a symbol for the community, not a lever for the price.

Shibarium: Shiba Inu's layer-2 blockchain with BONE as its gas token

A layer-2 blockchain is a separate network that processes transactions outside Ethereum and regularly reports its results back to Ethereum. The aim is to make transfers faster and cheaper. Shibarium is the layer-2 of the Shiba ecosystem and went live in August 2023. According to the project documentation, the network carries chain ID 109 and uses BONE as its fee currency.

Shibarium has a built-in burn mechanism: part of the transaction fees is swapped into SHIB and destroyed. On paper, every use of the network should thus reduce the supply of SHIB. In practice, the effect depends on the number of transactions, and that number is low. The capital deposited on Shibarium, known in the industry as TVL (total value locked), stood at around $130,000 on November 5, according to DefiLlama. Our analysis of October 30 had measured $41,104 for that day and found a decline of 99.4 percent from the peak in December 2024. Both figures fluctuate sharply, and both are very low for a blockchain this well known.

A bridge connects Ethereum and Shibarium: it locks tokens on one side and issues them on the other at a ratio of 1:1. Anyone using SHIB on Shibarium therefore holds a representation of their balance that depends on this bridge.

BONE, LEASH and TREAT: the role of the side tokens in the Shiba Inu ecosystem

Besides SHIB, there are three further tokens that are often confused. The project's documentation describes their roles as follows:

BONE is Shibarium's fee and staking token and the main token for voting in the Shib DAO. Anyone executing a transaction on Shibarium pays in BONE.
LEASH has a very small supply and is presented by the project as a scarce premium token. It plays a role mainly in the metaverse project, in which virtual plots of land were sold.
TREAT is intended as a reward and utility token, for instance for incentives within the ecosystem.

For investors, this split matters because the value of Shibarium does not automatically flow to SHIB. Fees go to BONE. SHIB benefits only indirectly through the burn share, which is small at current usage levels.

ShibaSwap and Shib DAO: what the Shiba Inu network is actually used for

ShibaSwap is a decentralised exchange, a so-called DEX, on which you swap tokens directly from your wallet without an account at a provider. ShibaSwap runs on Ethereum and on Shibarium. Those who provide liquidity there receive a share of the trading fees and, on Ethereum, BONE as an additional reward.

The Shib DAO is the ecosystem's voting system. A DAO, short for decentralised autonomous organisation, is a group in which token holders vote on proposals instead of a board making decisions. With Shiba Inu, votes are weighted by tokens held. On top of this come a naming service for wallet addresses, a metaverse project and tools for developers who want to build their own applications on Shibarium.

So the offering is broad, but usage is thin. Most SHIB sits on centralised exchanges and is traded there rather than deployed in applications. For valuing the coin, this is the crux: SHIB is first and foremost a trading asset.

The 2025 Shibarium bridge attack: what the incident reveals about Shiba Inu's validators

In September 2025, the bridge between Ethereum and Shibarium was attacked. According to the industry outlets The Block and Forklog, ETH and SHIB worth $2.3 million to $2.4 million were drained. These reports say the attacker used a flash loan, a credit taken out and repaid within a single transaction, to borrow around 4.6 million BONE and thereby secure the necessary voting majority among the validators, the computers that confirm transactions on Shibarium. The attacker is also said to have had access to validators' signing keys.

The development team described the incident as misuse of stolen keys rather than a flaw in the protocol itself, and temporarily suspended staking. Whatever the classification, the case exposes a fundamental problem of small networks: when a few validators with relatively little capital secure the bridge, protection is weaker than on large networks. Anyone holding SHIB on Shibarium shares in this bridge risk. Anyone holding SHIB on Ethereum or at an exchange is not directly affected.

Shiba Inu price and market cap: where SHIB stands in November 2026

Market capitalisation is the price multiplied by the number of tokens in circulation. For SHIB, it stood at around €2.4 billion on November 5, 2026. Trading volume over the past 24 hours was a little over €54 million, according to CoinGecko. Over 30 days, SHIB has lost about 21 percent, and over one year roughly half its value.

The record high dates from October 27, 2021, at around €0.000074. At the time, Shiba Inu briefly ranked among the ten largest cryptocurrencies. The price has never come close to that level since. How analysts see the outlook, with bull and bear scenarios and the reasoning behind them, is summarised in our Shiba Inu price prediction. No figure in this profile is a forecast.

A comparison helps put this in perspective: much of SHIB's price movement follows the broader market and sentiment in the memecoin scene. News from within the ecosystem, such as Shibarium upgrades, has rarely moved the price for long in recent years.

Buying and storing Shiba Inu in Germany: MiCA exchanges, wallets and the holding period

SHIB is traded on many centralised exchanges. Since the transitional period of the European crypto regulation MiCA expired in Germany, providers offering you crypto services there need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider (CASP). You can check which exchange holds one in the public register of the European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA. Our crypto exchange comparison gives an overview of fees, spreads and licences. When buying tokens with this many zeros, pay particular attention to the spread, the gap between the buying and selling price: with instant-buy features, it is often higher than the stated fee.

You have three options for storage. You leave the tokens on the exchange and bear its risk. You transfer them to a software wallet on Ethereum, in which case you pay gas in ETH. Or you use a hardware wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens; for larger amounts, this is the safest route. When sending, make sure you pick the right network: SHIB on Ethereum and SHIB on Shibarium are two separate balances linked by the bridge.

For tax purposes in Germany, Section 23 of the Income Tax Act currently applies. Gains from selling SHIB are tax-free if you have held the tokens for more than one year. If you sell earlier, gains count as private disposal transactions and are taxed at your personal rate, provided that total gains from such transactions in the year reach the exemption threshold of €1,000. Swapping SHIB into another token, such as BONE, also counts as a sale for tax purposes. Reforms to the holding period are under political discussion; what applies is decided only by a law that has been passed.

Shiba Inu risks: concentration, liquidity and a lack of scarcity

The first risk is the lack of scarcity in any sense that matters for the price. 589 trillion tokens is a quantity on which even large burn campaigns barely make a dent. Anyone hoping for Bitcoin-style scarcity will be disappointed by the arithmetic.

The second risk is dependence on sentiment. Memecoins are among the first assets sold when the market weakens, and SHIB has repeatedly suffered price falls of 50 percent or more within a few months. A total loss cannot be ruled out for a token with no earnings and no issuer bearing liability.

The third risk concerns the ecosystem: Shibarium has little capital and few validators, and the 2025 bridge attack showed that this is exactly where the weak points lie. In addition, the project has no legal entity based in the EU that you could turn to if problems arise. For any claims, you depend on your exchange.

A fourth risk is distribution. Large addresses, including exchange wallets, hold substantial shares of the circulating supply. When they move larger amounts, the price reacts, and this often only becomes visible after the fact.

Shiba Inu's verdict: a sentiment play until Shibarium finds real users

Shiba Inu is a memecoin with its own network, but that network is not yet used enough to support the coin. If you still want to hold SHIB, three steps will help:

Choose a licensed exchange: Check whether your provider holds MiCA authorisation and how wide the spread on SHIB is. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges shows the differences.
Decide on storage: Before buying, decide whether your tokens will stay on the exchange or move to a device of your own. Our hardware wallet comparison lists which devices support ERC-20 tokens.
Record your purchase dates: Note the date, amount and price of each tranche so that you can prove the one-year holding period. If you make many small purchases, the tools in our crypto tax tool comparison will do the maths for you.

(As of November 5, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Frequently asked questions about Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu is a memecoin that launched in August 2020 as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Around the SHIB token, the layer-2 blockchain Shibarium, the ShibaSwap exchange and the side tokens BONE, LEASH and TREAT have emerged.

One quadrillion SHIB were created at launch. According to Shibburn, around 410.8 trillion have been burned, leaving about 589 trillion Shiba Inu in circulation.

With around 589 trillion tokens, a Shiba Inu price of one euro would imply a valuation of 589 trillion euros. Without massive further burning, this is mathematically ruled out.

Shibarium is the layer-2 blockchain of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. It has been running since August 2023 and uses BONE as its fee currency. The capital deposited there stood at around $130,000 on November 5, 2026, according to DefiLlama.

Gains from selling Shiba Inu are tax-free under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act if you have held the tokens for more than one year. Before that, your personal tax rate applies, provided your gains from private disposal transactions reach €1,000 in the year.

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text. The feature image was generated with AI.

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Crypto news that's actually worth your time.

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