Buy Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu began in August 2020 as an experiment by someone calling themselves Ryoshi, who has never been identified and has since walked away entirely. It was launched with a quadrillion tokens, no funding round and no team allocation, which was unusual even by the standards of the moment.

What happened next is the part worth knowing, because it explains the supply. Half the total, five hundred trillion tokens, was sent unsolicited to Vitalik Buterin, the idea being that nobody could accuse the founder of holding it. Buterin had not asked for it and did not want it.

In May 2021 he disposed of the lot. Roughly ninety percent was burned outright, permanently removing about forty percent of the entire supply, and the remainder went to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund in a donation worth around a billion dollars at the time. A joke token had accidentally become one of the largest single charitable gifts in the sector's history.

Technically SHIB is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, which has a practical consequence when you hold it. Moving SHIB means paying an Ethereum gas fee in ETH, not in SHIB, so a wallet containing only SHIB cannot send anything. Keep a small ETH balance alongside it.

The project has since built more than the token. ShibaSwap is its own exchange, and Shibarium, a layer two launched in 2023, was an attempt to give the ecosystem somewhere cheaper to operate than Ethereum mainnet. Part of the design routes a share of Shibarium's activity into burning SHIB, which is the closest the project comes to a supply mechanism. Whether any of it changes the fundamental picture is arguable, and the burn rates involved are small against a float measured in hundreds of trillions.

That fundamental picture is straightforward. SHIB has no supply cap in the usual sense, an enormous circulating float, and a price driven almost entirely by attention. It has produced extraordinary returns and extraordinary losses inside the same twelve-month windows, and neither is predictable.

The scale of the float is itself the thing people find hardest to reason about. With hundreds of trillions of tokens in circulation, the price per token sits at a tiny fraction of a cent, and that low number invites a comparison with cheap shares that does not hold. What matters is the total value of every token combined, not the price of one, and burning tokens changes that arithmetic only if the burn is large enough to matter.

Buying is direct. Choose an amount, pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or bank transfer, and the SHIB arrives at an Ethereum address you control. Confirm the address is an Ethereum one and that you hold some ETH for future transfers.