Shiba Inu

SHIB is a dog-themed meme token on Ethereum, with an ecosystem including the Shibarium network.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Its contract was created on 31 July 2020 by a pseudonymous founder known as Ryoshi, and it was launched as a dog-themed meme token and 'community experiment'. No company issues SHIB and the contract has no owner: it cannot mint new tokens, pause transfers or block addresses.

The contract started with 1 quadrillion SHIB. Half was sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and half was locked in a Uniswap pool. In May 2021 Buterin sent about 410 trillion SHIB to a dead address and gave much of the rest to charity, including 50 trillion SHIB to an Indian COVID-19 relief fund. On 27 September 2026 about 589.5 trillion SHIB remained outside burn addresses. New burns are now tiny.

Around the token, developers built ShibaSwap, a decentralised exchange, and Shibarium, an Ethereum layer 2 network whose fees are paid in the BONE token rather than SHIB. Holders can lock SHIB in Bury 2.0 to get voting power in the Shib DAO, but this pays no rewards. On-chain use is small: about $56,000 was locked on Shibarium and about $6.6 million in ShibaSwap in September 2026. In September 2025 an attacker took about $2.4 million from the Shibarium bridge.

Most SHIB activity is trading on centralised exchanges, and futures make up most of that volume. SHIB was worth about $3.5 billion in total on 27 September 2026, about 93% below its October 2021 peak. In March 2026 the US SEC named SHIB as an example of a digital commodity, and T. Rowe Price listed it as an eligible holding for a multi-asset crypto ETF.