Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme-inspired cryptocurrency featuring the Shiba Inu dog breed as its mascot.

This huge supply means that even relatively small price goals would imply astronomical market caps in the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme-inspired cryptocurrency featuring the Shiba Inu dog breed as its mascot. It began as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, launched in August 2020 by the pseudonymous founder “Ryoshi” with the vision of creating a decentralized, community-driven project.

Initially dubbed the “Dogecoin killer,” Shiba Inu quickly gained viral popularity during the 2021 memecoin mania, soaring in value and amassing a large following known as the ‘Shib Army.’

Today, SHIB has evolved beyond its joke-coin origins into a broader Shiba Inu Ecosystem that includes a decentralized exchange (ShibaSwap), NFTs, a metaverse project in development, and even its own Layer-2 blockchain called Shibarium.

With a current market capitalization around $7–8 billion, Shiba Inu consistently ranks among the top cryptocurrencies by market cap and is the second-largest memecoin (after Dogecoin) in this niche sector.

Recent Developments and Ecosystem

One of the biggest updates has been the rollout and improvement of Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s Layer-2 network. Since launch, the development team has been fine-tuning Shibarium – and in June 2025 they are implementing a major upgrade to improve network performance.

According to core developer Shytoshi Kusama, the June 2025 Shibarium update will “optimize the distribution of network validator nodes, better handle transaction congestion, and provide more stable support for DeFi and NFT projects” on the network.

This indicates the team is addressing early growing pains (such as occasional congestion) to bolster Shibarium’s scalability and reliability. Yet, as noted, early adoption has been slow – Shibarium’s TVL is tiny relative to other chains.

Another headline development is Shiba Inu’s token burn initiatives. In August 2024, Shibarium introduced an automated burn mechanism tied to transaction fees: 70% of every transaction fee on Shibarium is now converted to SHIB and permanently burned (removed from circulation), with the remaining 30% retained for network maintenance.

This burn mechanic, activated via a hard-fork upgrade (Bor v1.1.2) on Aug. 9, 2024, was a long-awaited community request designed to gradually make SHIB more scarce.

Since then, regular burns have been occurring. In May 2025 alone, roughly 320 million SHIB were burned through Shibarium transaction fees, an 18% increase in burn rate compared to the same period a year prior.

A few months ago, weekly burns in excess of 1 billion SHIB were common, but that momentum has slowed in the past weeks.

On the ecosystem expansion front, Shiba Inu is actively working on its metaverse and gaming projects. Shib: The Metaverse, the project’s anticipated virtual world, has reportedly entered the Alpha testing phase as of mid-2025

The Shiba Inu team is laying groundwork for an in-metaverse economy; for instance, virtual land plots in the Shib metaverse will support multi-currency transactions using SHIB and its sister tokens, BONE and LEASH.

The team has even rolled out small teaser applications – for example, in March 2025 the Shiba Inu devs introduced a “fishing game” as part of testing the metaverse’s in-game economy systems.

These steps suggest that Shiba Inu is trying to transition from a purely meme-centric token toward a broader entertainment and DeFi ecosystem, which could drive more organic demand for SHIB if successful.

On-chain data

Meanwhile, whale movements and market activity around SHIB have been notable. On-chain data indicates that large holders (whales) have been reducing their SHIB exposure in 2025, which has impacted price dynamics.

Santiment data shows that the total supply of SHIB held by whale addresses (excluding exchanges) dropped from about 743 trillion at the start of the year to roughly 723 trillion by early June. In other words, whales offloaded about 20 trillion SHIB in the first half of 2025 – a significant sell-off that reflects a cautious stance by big players.

There have been some sporadic large transactions, for instance, a single day in early June saw a 24.3 trillion SHIB transfer among top wallets, the largest in six months, which drew community buzz. However, overall whale transaction volumes are down over 90% compared to early-year peaks.

Indicating that many whales have stepped to the sidelines after unloading. The whale exodus became evident after SHIB’s price rally in May fizzled. Whale netflows turned deeply negative (-311%) by late May and whale address counts were in a slow decline.

In practical terms, fewer large buyers in the market has meant increased selling pressure and lower