Is the Shiba Inu (SHIB) Dip a Buying Opportunity?

Shiba Inu is famous for delivering a staggering 45,278,000% gain in 2021, which could have turned a perfectly timed investment of just $3 into more than $1 million.

The price of Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) token is down about 46% in 2025 so far. At the start of the year, it was trading at $0.0000118, but now it is trading at $0.0000064.

Here's a look at what happened and what's next for the meme token.

What Happened: Shiba Inu began the year on a weak footing after losing more than 90% of its value in 2022. The token hit an all-time high of $0.000086 in October 2021, but by mid-2022, demand from speculators had disappeared.

Shiba Inu's incredible 2021 gain was driven entirely by speculation. The token has no use case out in the real world, so consumers and businesses have little reason to own it. In fact, according to cryptocurrency directory Cryptwerk, just 1,036 merchants worldwide accept it as payment for goods and services.

After the token's price crashed, its developers tried to create new use cases to support its value. They started building a Shiba Inu-themed metaverse where users could spend their tokens to customize virtual plots of land, but it still hasn't launched. They also created a Shiba Inu-themed digital card game to draw attention to the ecosystem, and they launched a Layer-2 blockchain solution called Shibarium to rectify some of the clunkiness and high costs associated with the legacy Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) network, upon which Shiba Inu was originally built. The goal was to make Shiba Inu more attractive as a payment mechanism to drive more adoption among consumers and businesses.

However, none of these endeavors appeared to be working in the first half of 2025. Shibarium faced several setbacks that led to repeated delays, while the metaverse and card game also failed to generate hype among the community.

The meme token also failed to benefit from the broader crypto rally that was driven by Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election last November. The markets priced in a pro-crypto administration under Trump, who vowed to make America "the crypto capital of the planet" and treat the industry with a lighter regulatory touch to pave the way for new use cases.

Under Trump's watch, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has already paused or withdrawn its active lawsuits against crypto exchanges like Binance and Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN). The agency is also expected to approve exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for other cryptocurrencies besides the majors like Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and Ethereum. One candidate is XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), but applications have also been submitted for Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) ETFs.

ETFs let financial advisors and institutional investors buy cryptocurrencies in a safe, regulated manner, so they can increase the pool of potential buyers, thus leading to higher prices. But investors might want to exercise caution. An ETF is only helpful if investors actually want to own the underlying asset. The steep downside in Shiba Inu this year, and since 2021 more broadly, suggests that investors tend to sell at every opportunity instead. That isn't surprising given the sheer lack of a true use case, meaning there is nothing but demand from speculators supporting the meme token's value.

One of the biggest barriers to another historic rally is Shiba Inu's enormous supply. There are 589.5 trillion tokens in circulation, which is why it trades at such a small price of $0.0000118 per token right now. Simple math suggests that if it reached a more conventional price of $1 per token, then Shiba Inu's market capitalization would top $589 trillion. That would make it 196 times more valuable than Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), which has the highest cap in the world.

In other words, reaching $1 is practically impossible in Shiba Inu's current state. The community is banding together to burn tokens, which means to remove them from circulation forever, but eliminating enough to justify a price of $1 could take thousands of years.

What's Next For Shiba Inu: Despite the year-to-date decline, Shiba Inu is still up 97% from its year-end 2024 closing price of $0.000021.

Given all of Shiba Inu's headwinds and the lack of potential upside in the future, it seems that investors shouldn't use the year-to-date dip as a buying opportunity and they will probably be better off avoiding the meme token entirely.