No.034
Shiba Inu SHIB
the Shiba who looked at the most famous dog in crypto and said “cute, but there's a quadrillion of me”
🎭 the loud, unbothered underdog: half hype machine, half actual project, and oddly proud of both
💬 “Yeah, yeah, I started as a Doge knock-off. Funny thing is, I outgrew the joke. Vitalik torched a fat chunk of me and I came back swinging with my own town. Bark louder than the doubters. 🔥🐾”
- Launched in 2020 as an open Dogecoin knock-off. The cheeky part: it took the bit seriously.
- No blockchain of its own. It's a token that lives on Ethereum (ERC-20), full stop.
- Born one quadrillion strong, then thinned out by ‘burning’. The hype says scarce; the math says still astronomically plentiful.
📖 The Story
Let's be honest about how this one started. In August 2020 an anonymous figure calling themselves ‘Ryoshi’ shipped a coin that was, on purpose, a copy of the most famous dog in crypto. No real name, no face, no original mascot. The whole pitch was basically: Dogecoin is one dog, so here are a quadrillion of them. By the rules of crypto, that should have been the punchline. It wasn't.
Here's where it gets cheeky. Ryoshi locked up half the supply as liquidity, then dumped the other half straight onto Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, without asking. A gift nobody requested. Vitalik did not play along the way meme traders hoped. In May 2021 he burned roughly 410 trillion SHIB for good, then handed over 50 trillion more (worth above a billion dollars at the time) to a COVID relief fund in India. Plenty of holders cheered the burn for pumping the price. Fewer noticed they were cheering a man giving their bag away.
And the part that actually earns SHIB some respect: in August 2023 it shipped Shibarium, its own layer-2 chain. The launch promptly choked under its own traffic and went dark for days, which is very on-brand. It came back. Most meme coins never build anything at all, so a janky-but-real network counts for something.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Unlike Dogecoin, Shiba Inu has no blockchain of its own. Instead it's a token renting space on the big city of Ethereum (an ERC-20 token). So when you send and receive SHIB, the Ethereum network does the verifying for it (these days Ethereum runs on ‘proof of stake’, PoS). And in 2023, for the times when Ethereum's fees run high, it added its own cheaper, faster neighborhood right next door, ‘Shibarium’.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- That community is the real product. The ‘SHIB Army’ is loud, sticky, and genuinely keeps the project alive
- Living on Ethereum means it gets smart contracts for free (its own DEX ‘ShibaSwap’, plus three tokens: SHIB · LEASH · BONE)
- Credit where it's due: most meme coins ship a logo and a Twitter account. This one shipped an actual L2, ‘Shibarium’
- Fixed at one quadrillion and shrinking through burns, which beats Dogecoin's bottomless minting on paper
- Strip away the vibes and the actual day-to-day usefulness is thin. The price runs on attention, not need
- It swings hard. It once jumped about 240% in a week, then gave back roughly 55% the next month. That's not investing, that's weather
- Whale risk is baked in. Half the supply once sat in a single wallet, and a few big holders can still move the floor
- The founder, ‘Ryoshi’, was anonymous and walked away. Nobody is clearly on the hook if things go sideways
🧬 Evolution lineage
Shiba Inu isn't a ‘fork’ made by copying code. It's Dogecoin's rival (a sibling in the meme lineage), sharing the same Shiba mascot, and technically it's a token on Ethereum (more like a child). Then in 2023 it branched off its own L2, Shibarium.
Its technical parent is someone else, Shiba Inu runs on top of ♦️ Ethereum.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Shiba Inu (SHIB)?
- A meme coin created in August 2020 by an anonymous person known only as ‘Ryoshi’. It launched as a rival modeled on Dogecoin and uses the same Shiba Inu mascot. It has no blockchain of its own, it's an ERC-20 token that runs on Ethereum.
- How is it different from Dogecoin?
- Both are Shiba Inu meme coins, but Dogecoin has its own blockchain (built on Litecoin) and is minted endlessly. Shiba Inu is a token on Ethereum, minted once at a fixed one quadrillion and then shrunk over time by ‘burning’. SHIB started life as a self-styled ‘Dogecoin competitor’.
- What's the connection to Vitalik Buterin?
- At launch, half of the entire supply was sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In May 2021 he permanently burned about 410 trillion of the SHIB he held, and donated over 50 trillion SHIB (worth more than a billion dollars at the time) to a COVID relief fund in India.
- What is Shibarium?
- It's Shiba Inu's own layer-2 blockchain, launched in August 2023. It was built to make transactions cheaper and faster for times when Ethereum's fees are high, a space of its own. It briefly stalled from overload right after launch, then came back online in late August.
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK · 2026-06-04).