Shiba inu (SHIB) is one of the most popular meme-based cryptocurrency tokens, initially billed by its anonymous developer as the “dogecoin killer”. 

After reaching record-highs in October 2021, this year the shiba coin has to navigate through bearish price action amid a wider cryptocurrency sell-off.

The memecoin’s coin availability and ownership concentration may be another factor driving its price. Yet how many shiba inu coins are there in the world? Here we take a look at the coin’s supply, how many shiba inu coins are available for trading or holding, and what it means for the price. 

What is Shiba?

The community-driven project emerged in August 2020 as meme coins took off. The project has since developed into an ecosystem, including its ShibaSwap decentralised exchange (DEX), Shiboshi non-fungible tokens (NFTs), liquidity token LEASH and governance token BONE.

Unlike DOGE, which runs on a hard fork of the Litecoin (LTC) blockchain, SHIB runs on the Ethereum blockchain, conforming to the ERC-20 standard. Shiba developers are working on launching the Shibarium Layer 2 network protocol. 

Layer 2 networks run on top of Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum to enhance scalability, reduce processing times and cut transaction fees. Once Shibarium launches, SHIB tokens will be migrated to run on the protocol rather than on Ethereum directly.

The Unification Foundation, which is developing Shibarium, said in late June that the Shibarium Public Beta TestNet is planned to launch in the third quarter.

How many shiba inu coins are there?

The total number of shiba inu coins in circulation today is different from when the project launched in 2020. 

The SHIB token was designed to have a maximum supply of one quadrillion tokens, which the developers said would allow users to hold billions or even trillions of tokens and generate large returns even if the price remained well below $0.01. 

When SHIB launched the developers sent 500 trillion tokens, or 50% of the total supply, to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s public wallet and locked the remaining 50% to the Uniswap DEX. SHIB launched via an initial exchange offering (IEO) on Uniswap. The lead developer, using the name Ryoshi, posted that they did not pre-mine or hold any SHIB tokens.

In May 2021, Buterin burned 90% of the SHIB tokens sent to his wallet and donated more than 50 trillion tokens, valued at more than $931m at the time, to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund. It’s worth noting that the SHIB tokens sent to the fund were not burned and remain part of the circulating supply.

Buterin said that he did not want control over other cryptocurrency projects and urged project developers not to send him their tokens.

As a result of Buterin’s SHIB coin burn, data collated by cryptocurrency tracker websites shows that the single largest SHIB holder is a dead wallet address with 410 trillion tokens that accounts for 40% of the initial total supply. The move effectively reduced SHIB’s total circulating supply to 550 trillion tokens from 1 quadrillion.

On 23 April 2022, the shiba inu developers collaborated with the programmers of the Ryoshi Vision token to launch a coin burning portal, responding to requests from the community to support the value of SHIB tokens by reducing the circulating supply. The burning mechanism rewards users who burn their SHIB with RYOSHI tokens. In the first 24 hours, the portal burned more than 8 billion SHIB tokens.

On 24 July, the Shiba developers recognised in a blog post that there were ongoing problems with the burn portal and the speed of the RYOSHI token distribution. 

“This portal was powered by Ryoshi Vision and provided to Shiba’s development team as a benefit for both communities, while especially honouring Shiba Inu holders and their ongoing energy to eliminate tokens out of circulation in exchange for a reward system,” they wrote.

Data from the Shibburn portal, as of 28 July, which was set up to track the impact of the burning feature on SHIB supply, showed that a total of 410.37 trillion tokens have been burnt from the initial one quadrillion supply. That means aside from Buterin’s burn of 410 trillion SHIB, another 37 billion have been taken out of circulation permanently.

More than 500 million tokens were burned in the seven days to 28 July, the Shibburn data showed, with several large burns removing tens of thousands of tokens at a time. 

How many shiba inu coins are there now? The total SHIB supply at the time of writing was 589.63 trillion, with 31.56 trillion tokens staked. That puts the total circulating supply at 558.01 trillion. 

“If a staker decides to unstake, then it will cause Circulating Supply to increase. This does not mean that Shiba team is minting more $SHIB, this is not possible,” said Shibburn on its website.

The rate of coin burns slowed during the spring crash in cryptocurrency prices, but the SHIB price has crept up from a low of $0.000007197 on 18 June to $0.0000113 at the time of writing on 28 July.

The bearish sentiment in shiba comes amid the wider crypto winter of 2022 amid tightening monetary policy, soaring inflation and mounting recession fears, which saw crypto veterans BTC and ETH slumped over 40% and 50% this year, respectively. 

Who are the biggest holders of shiba inu?

Shiba inu’s developers emphasise that the project is community-based and decentralised.  

There are more than 585,000 community members, according to the shiba inu website. But is the project truly in the hands of the community, and how many shiba inu holders are there?

There were more than 1.21 million shiba inu token holders, as of 28 July, up from 1.19 million a month earlier on 29 June, according to data from WhaleStats and CoinCarp.

Ethereum “whales”, a term used to describe the largest holders of a cryptocurrency, are among the largest SHIB holders. 

Data compiled by WhaleStats, a crypto whale tracker, showed that at the time of writing SHIB was second only to ETH in the top 100 wallets on Ethereum, with an average of $5m held in 454 billion tokens, compared with $291m held in 178,704 ETH coins. 

SHIB was the biggest token position by dollar value among the top 100 Ethereum whales. 

The biggest owner of shiba inu coin that is still in circulation has a wallet containing 48.7 trillion tokens, which accounts for 4.87% of the initial 1 quadrillion supply. The top 100 SHIB holders account for 31% of total supply, the WhaleStats data showed.

Final thoughts

Note that all trading contains risk of losses. Always conduct your own due diligence before trading, looking at the latest news, fundamental and technical analysis and analyst commentary. 

Remember that your decision to trade should depend on your risk tolerance, account size and trading strategy, and your experience in the markets. Never trade money you cannot afford to lose. 

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