SHIB

Shiba Inu · Memecoin (Ethereum ERC-20) with a dormant Shibarium L2 ecosystem

44 /100

T4Speculative · #27 of 77

No engine yetTwo-way ↗low likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

Score qualifies for T3; held by Value engine 0 (needs 2), Adoption 0 (needs 2).

DemandSoundnessDurability

0 of 4536 of 408 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 100% of issued supply

Circulating 589.24T, 100%
No cap: supply can keep growing, see Supply discipline

FDV / market cap

1.0x

$2.9B / $2.9B

Market cap

$2.9B

Price $0.000005, 7d −1.6%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

A large, liquid memecoin with clean supply mechanics and no route to value beyond attention. The contract is immutable with no mint path, supply only shrinks, and no team, VC or presale allocation ever existed; half the launch supply went to Vitalik Buterin, who burned 410T and gave most of the rest to charity. The ecosystem meant to give SHIB utility has hollowed out: Shibarium runs a few hundred to ~1,800 transactions a day with ~$42K of DeFi value, validator staking has been offline since Apr 17, 2026, the Sep 2025 bridge exploit cost ~$2.4-4.1M, its lead developer said on Oct 2, 2026 that he pays the costs himself, and the official sites were unreachable at review. Two unlabelled clusters (a 64T wallet and 22 Coinbase-funded wallets with ~65T) hold ~22% of circulating supply, and institutional access stops at exchanges, Coinbase futures and one Swedish ETP.

How value reaches holders

Nothing reaches holders by design: SHIB is a fixed-supply ERC-20 with no fee, tax, staking yield or buyback. The Shibarium plan to turn most of the BONE base fee into SHIB burns is inert because the chain earned ~$910 of gas over the trailing year (DefiLlama); about 5.1B SHIB (~$30K, under 0.001% of supply) reached the two main burn addresses in the year to Oct 23, 2026, led by a third-party launchpad FeeDistributor and voluntary sends. ShibaSwap's ~$0.69M of trailing-year swap fees went to liquidity providers, and Bury (xSHIB, 3.45T staked) pays BONE and TREAT incentives that the Oct 1, 2026 status page listed as stalling

Score anatomy

Demand

0 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

Indirect sinks only: the designed Shibarium base-fee burn is inert (~$910 of chain gas in the trailing year), and ~5.1B SHIB (~$30K) hit burn addresses in the year, mostly from third-party contracts

Approved or designed but inert, indirect sinks only, or flows into a treasury or endowmenthigh confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

No realized protocol revenue reaches SHIB: Shibarium gas was ~$910 over the trailing year and ShibaSwap's ~$0.69M of swap fees all went to liquidity providers (DefiLlama, Oct 23, 2026)

Under $0.5M/yr, or emissions-subsidized onlyhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

Trading only: no gas role (Shibarium gas is BONE), not an Aave v3 Ethereum reserve, ~$1.2K posted on Morpho, and no measurable payment volume found

Trading onlymedium confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

The token is the product: Shibarium earned ~$910 of gas in a year and ShibaSwap fees are ~$0.69M

No product use: the token is the product, or the network or product is not live or sits idlehigh confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 0, minus 4 for routing 1 = cash flow 0. Money use 0. The engine is the stronger route: 0.

Soundness

36 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Immutable 2020 ERC-20: _mint runs only in the constructor, no owner, no proxy; totalSupply only falls via burns, so gross issuance is zero and nobody can mint

Hard cap or net deflationary by protocol rule, under 1%/yr gross growth, and nobody can mint past the cap or change the schedule short of a hard fork node operators adopthigh confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

No vesting, locks or team reserve: 589.24T of the 589.50T unburned supply circulates (99.96%); the other ~410.5T of the 1,000T issued sits at burn addresses

Fully vested, no scheduled unlockshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

No team, VC or presale allocation: 49.5% seeded Uniswap, 50.5% went to Vitalik Buterin (burned 410.24T, donated ~97T in May 2021); deployer pool buys ~0.9%; nobody directs supply

Under 2% to insiders, open software at launchmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Immutable Ethereum ERC-20 with no owner, pause, blacklist or upgrade path; the Sep 2025 Shibarium bridge exploit (~$2.4-4.1M) hit bridged assets, not the SHIB contract

Attack cost $1-10B, and 2+ independent production clients or a single client with 10+ years without a consensus failure; or immutable core contracts with no admin power over funds or fees on a base layer scoring 5high confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

8 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$3.0B market cap (band 4), $73.5M/day median volume (band 4), minus 1 for unfunded.

Mid-cap: $250M-1B market cap and $10M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

Trading since Jul 31, 2020 (6.2 years); fell ~94% from the Oct 2021 high and ~91% from the Mar 2024 high (Binance monthly), with no token-level exploit or rollback

5-8 years and survived an 80%+ drawdownhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

Top-tier spot (Coinbase, Binance, Robinhood, Kraken, Upbit), CFTC-regulated futures on Coinbase Derivatives and a Valour SEK ETP; no US single-asset ETF filing on EDGAR

OTC trust, non-US product, or a pending US filinghigh confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T3 Mixed, 2 gates are still open:

Value engine 0needs 2(open)
Adoption 0needs 2(open)
Score 44gate 40(met)
Supply 5gate 1(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Jul 31, 2028

Two-way ↗low likelihood

Shibarium recovery or wind-down: validator staking (offline since Apr 17, 2026), bridge status, daily transactions (~350-1,800 in Oct 2026) and who funds development; these drive the unfunded flag
Movements from the unlabelled 64.07T wallet 0x02e2...481e and the 22 wallets (~65.3T) funded from Coinbase 10 on Dec 6, 2025
A US single-asset SHIB ETF filing (none on EDGAR as of Oct 23, 2026) or disclosed SHIB holdings in T. Rowe Price's TKNZ
Eight years of trading on Jul 31, 2028, with two 80%+ drawdowns already behind it, would lift track record to 4
Burn flow (~5.1B SHIB, ~$30K in the trailing year): only a fee-funded burn at material scale would move routing

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 80%

Shiba Inu is an Ethereum memecoin with an unusually simple token contract: all supply was minted once in July 2020, the contract has no owner, no upgrade path and no way to create more, and burns can only reduce it. Half of the launch supply went to a Uniswap pool and the other half to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who in May 2021 burned about 410 trillion tokens and gave most of the rest to charity, so there was never a team or investor allocation. Holders receive nothing from fees. The plan to burn SHIB with fees from the Shibarium network has little to work with, since that network collected roughly $900 in gas over the past year, and burns from all sources totalled about 5 billion SHIB, near $30,000. Shibarium has thinned to between a few hundred and about 1,800 transactions a day, validator staking has been offline since April 2026, a September 2025 bridge exploit cost about $2.4 million to $4.1 million, and its lead developer has said he funds the network personally. Trading runs about $75 million a day at the 30-day median, much of it on derivatives and smaller venues. Institutional access comes through major exchanges, regulated futures on Coinbase Derivatives and one Swedish exchange-traded product; no US single-asset fund has been filed.

Structure (20 facts)

Chain: Ethereum ERC-20 (TokenMintERC20Token, solc 0.5.0, verified source, no owner, no proxy); bridged copies on Shibarium (PoS bridge, chain id 109) and BNB Chain (Binance-Peg, backed by 9.24T held in Binance's peg wallet)
What it is: memecoin; sibling tokens BONE (Shibarium gas and governance), LEASH and TREAT; ShibaSwap DEX; Shibarium L2
Genesis: Deployed 2020-07-31 by 0xb8f2...fa08, which minted 1,000T SHIB to itself and sent 495T (49.5%) to the SHIB/WETH Uniswap V2 pool (0x811b...954f) and 505T (50.5%) to Vitalik Buterin's 0xab58...ec9b (10T on Jul 31, 495T via the relay 0x4b4b...5011 on Aug 1-2, 2020). The initial 70.36M LP tokens also went to Vitalik's address, which removed that liquidity on 2021-05-12, so the 'locked liquidity' was custody by one person. No presale, VC round or team allocation; the deployer bought ~7.7T from the pool in Aug-Sep 2020 and recovered ~0.96T from a second LP position (~0.9% of issuance)
Vitalik disposal: 2021-05-12: 50.69T to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund Safe (which now holds 2.25M SHIB); 2021-05-16: 410.24T to 0xdead...2069; 2021-05-17: 46.0T to an Argent Vault whose owner is not publicly identified; small sales into the pool
Supply on chain: totalSupply() 999,982,327,167,466 (17.67B removed via burn()); 410,437,114,516,937 at 0xdead000000000000000042069420694206942069, 49.5B at 0x...dEaD, 255.7B stuck in the token contract; CoinGecko circulating 589,238,295,084,086 and total 589,495,732,258,842 (2026-10-23); Shibburn counts 410.845T burned
Mint authority: none: _mint is called only in the constructor, and the contract has no owner, pause, blacklist or upgrade function (source read on Etherscan, eth_call confirms no owner())
Burns: trailing year to 2026-10-23: ~5.09B SHIB to the two main burn addresses (~$30K, under 0.001% of circulating), largest sender a third-party FeeDistributor (0x1fc3...9a89) that burns 70% of launchpad fees; burn() calls removed a further 8.8M; Shibburn 30-day figure 673M SHIB ($3,810)
Market cap (approx): $3,007,000,000
Holders: ~1.70M holder addresses (Ethplorer). Excluding burn addresses, top 10 = 38.6% of circulating, mostly exchanges (Robinhood 39.3T, Binance 28 37.6T, Crypto.com 22 27.3T, Bithumb 67 16.2T). Largest non-exchange holder an unlabelled EOA with 64.07T (10.9%, active since Dec 2022, fed by >1,000 small transfers); 22 wallets of ~2.97T each (~65.3T, 11.1%) were funded from Coinbase 10 on 2025-12-06 and have never sent a transaction (likely custody, unconfirmed); a Robinhood-funded EOA holds 14.15T; seven more wallets hold 5.0T each
Ecosystem tokens: BONE ~$13.7M market cap (Shibarium gas, 250M max); TREAT ~$0.19M; LEASH v1 (rebasing UFragments contract, owner renounced) has been rebased about 10% a day by one address since 2025-08-11, taking supply from ~118K to 8.04e17 by 2026-06-25 (~$1.6M market cap). None routes value to SHIB holders
Shibarium: chain live (block 19,547,957 at 2026-10-23 13:29 UTC, ~5.0 s blocks) but a 200-block sample averaged 0.02 tx per block (~350/day); explorer snapshots showed 1,620-1,804 tx/day in early Oct 2026 and the explorer was only ~55% indexed; DefiLlama: ~$910 of gas fees over the trailing year, TVL ~$42K; validator staking under maintenance since 2026-04-17; node and RPC rotation plus a reorg fix in Sep 2026; developer Kaal Dhairya answered 'Yours truly' on 2026-10-02 when asked who pays for Shibarium
Incidents: 2025-09-12 Shibarium bridge exploit: the attacker acquired 4.6M BONE to reach validator signing majority (10 of 12 keys reported compromised) and drained 224.57 ETH, 92.6B SHIB and other tokens (~$2.3-2.4M in early reports, ~$4.1M per the 2025-09-17 team update); keys rotated, the 4.6M BONE recovered, a bridge restart and refunds were being prepared in Oct 2025 (current status not verified). Bridged assets only; the Ethereum SHIB contract was untouched. Below the $50M exploit line for track record
Site availability: shib.io, shibaswap.com, docs.shib.io and shibariumscan.io all returned Cloudflare tunnel errors (530 / error 1033) on repeated checks 2026-10-23 13:30-13:50 UTC; may be transient
Value accrual: none: no fee, tax, staking yield or buyback on SHIB; Shibarium's designed base-fee-to-SHIB burn is inert at ~$910/yr of fees; ShibaSwap swap fees (~$0.69M trailing year, DefiLlama revenue 0) go to LPs; Bury (xSHIB, 3.45T staked) pays BONE and TREAT incentives, listed as stalling on the 2026-10-01 status page
Revenue: 0 realized protocol revenue attributable to SHIB over the trailing 365 days
Liquidity: 30-day median ~$75M/day (CoinGecko daily series); 2026-10-23 spot ~$57M across ~170 tickers: Binance SHIBUSDT $3.8M, Upbit $2.9M, OKX $2.1M, Coinbase ~$0.3M, with KuCoin and low-tier venues making up most of the rest; Binance 1000SHIB perpetual $35.9M/day, open interest ~$22M
Institutional access: no US single-asset SHIB ETF or trust filing on EDGAR (full-text searches for 'Shiba Inu ETF', 'SHIB ETF', 'Shiba Inu Trust' return zero, 2026-10-23); SHIB is an eligible asset of T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF (TKNZ, 424B3 2026-09-09) and appears in pending multi-asset filings (Cryptex BAGZ, KraneShares Crypto Trust); CFTC-regulated SHIB monthly and 1000SHIB perpetual-style futures on Coinbase Derivatives; Valour Shiba Inu SEK ETP (CH1108681524, Spotlight, since 2025-08-27); Robinhood and Coinbase custody
Usage: no monetary role found: not gas on any chain, not an Aave v3 Ethereum reserve, ~$1.2K posted as collateral in Morpho markets (2026-10-23); no measurable payment volume found
Team: pseudonymous lead Shytoshi Kusama was reported in Jun 2026 to be focused on an independent AI project; a Shib Alpha Layer and a Zama FHE privacy upgrade were announced for 2026 with no delivery found (secondary sources)
Provenance gaps: owners of the 64.07T wallet and the Coinbase-funded 22-wallet cluster; Shibarium bridge restart and refund completion; identity of the LEASH rebase caller (0x4453...74b5); whether the official-site outage on 2026-10-23 is transient

Market figures at report date (Oct 23, 2026)

Price (approx): $0.0000051
All-time high / low: 0.00008616 (2021-10-27, CoinGecko); about -94% from the Oct 2021 high to the Jun 2023 low and about -91% from the Mar 2024 high (0.0000457) to the Jun 2026 low (Binance monthly); -49% over 1y

Sources (18)

Compare with

How the ranking works and how SHIB compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:

GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=SHIB