Shiba Inu

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Shiba Inu
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
ticker	SHIB
blockchain	Ethereum
launched	August 2020
peak market cap	about 41 billion dollars (October 2021)

Shiba Inu is a dog themed meme coin launched on Ethereum in August 2020 that styled itself the Dogecoin killer and peaked at about 41 billion dollars in October 2021, one of the largest meme coin valuations ever recorded.

Contents

1 Origin
2 Market history
3 Shibarium hack and leadership controversy
4 Cultural impact
5 References

Shiba Inu is a meme coin on Ethereum created in August 2020 by a pseudonymous founder known as Ryoshi. Marketed as an experiment in decentralized community building and as a rival to Dogecoin, it grew into one of the most valuable meme coins in history and remains a fixture of every meme coin canon.

Origin

Ryoshi launched SHIB with a supply of one quadrillion tokens, locking half into Uniswap liquidity and sending the other half, unsolicited, to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. The gesture was framed as proof that the team could never dump a hidden stash, since Buterin controlled it. The coin adopted the same Shiba Inu dog that inspired Dogecoin and branded itself the Dogecoin killer, later adding companion tokens LEASH and BONE and the ShibaSwap exchange. Ryoshi left the public Shiba Inu space in May 2022, choosing anonymity in a manner the project itself compared to Satoshi Nakamoto's disappearance.

Market history

In May 2021 Buterin donated about 50 trillion SHIB, worth roughly 1 billion dollars at the time, to the India COVID Crypto Relief Fund, then burned about 410 trillion SHIB, roughly 6 billion dollars worth and about 41 percent of supply, saying he did not want the power. The burn became one of the most famous events in meme coin history. After major exchange listings through 2021, SHIB entered a historic October 2021 run driven by whale accumulation and a viral petition for a Robinhood listing, reaching an all time high of about 0.000086 dollars on October 27, 2021 and a market capitalization of about 41 billion dollars, briefly overtaking Dogecoin. The ecosystem later shipped the Shibarium layer 2 network in August 2023. By August 2026 SHIB's market capitalization stood near 2.6 billion dollars, about 95 percent below its peak but still among the largest meme coins.

Shibarium hack and leadership controversy

On September 12, 2025 an attacker used a flash loan to buy about 4.6 million BONE tokens, Shibarium's gas and governance asset, then delegated them to a validator called Ryoshi Validator 1 to seize more than two thirds of voting power and push malicious software onto the layer two network. Shiba Inu paused staking and unstaking and brought in PeckShield for forensics; reported losses across coverage range from about 2.3 million to 4.1 million dollars, and SHIB and BONE both dropped on the news. Lead ambassador Shytoshi Kusama went quiet for over a month afterward, then broke silence saying rumors of his absence were "utterly preposterous" and that he had been in a "war room" with developer Kaal Dhairya throughout. Separately, the community criticized an official Shiba Inu website update for failing to credit Ryoshi as founder, which Kusama called an attempt to "erase" project history.

Beyond Shibarium, the ecosystem has kept building a metaverse product, Shib: The Metaverse, with marketing lead Lucie teasing a hub called SHIB CITY and a planned Ryoshi themed hub named for the vanished founder, ongoing as of 2026.

Cultural impact

SHIB defined the second great meme coin cycle and proved Dogecoin was a genre, not a fluke. Its playbook, a giant supply, a dog mascot, a burn narrative, and an army of self styled SHIB Army holders, was copied by thousands of tokens from Floki to Baby Doge Coin. The Buterin burn set the template for every burn narrative traded in the trenches since, and SHIB's rise from fractions of a cent to a top ten asset remains the canonical example of meme coin upside cited by traders in every cycle.

Shiba Inu

Origin

Market history

Shibarium hack and leadership controversy

Cultural impact

References