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Shiba Inu is the second most valuable meme coin by market cap, second only to Dogecoin. Launched only in 2020, the token has seen its popularity and value soar. SHIB is known for its high supply, which started at one quadrillion tokens. Over the years, that supply has gradually reduced due to the Shiba Inu coin burn. In two years, more than 410 trillion tokens have been burnt.
However, there is still a lot more burning left to do if the value of Shiba Inu is to ever reach $1 or even $0.01. Here, we discuss everything you need to know about the Shiba Inu coin burn rate and other details.
What does it mean when Shiba Inu is burned?
Shiba Inu coin burning describes how the supply of the token reduces. Coin burning is a common practice among several crypto projects that want to become deflationary. It is the process of removing tokens from circulation. In order to do this, the project usually has burner addresses where the coins cannot be retrieved. The burner addresses are also sometimes called dead wallets.
Unlike the regular wallets that people use to send and receive crypto assets, nobody knows the private key of a burn address. This means that any cryptocurrency that’s sent to a burn address is stuck there forever.
Anyone can burn a cryptocurrency by sending it to a burn address. But it is not something a regular holder would want to do because it means losing money. Most times, the project's developers decide to burn the token so that the supply can drop. For Shiba Inu, burning SHIB was a collective decision by the community and developers.
Several projects have initiated coin burning since it became popular in 2017. This includes Ethereum, BNB, Terra Classic, and many others. Still, Shiba Inu coin burning is one of the most popular in the crypto space.
Why does Shiba Inu have coin burning?
The Shiba Inu coin burning mechanism exists because of its supply at launch. Unlike many other crypto assets, whose circulating supply gradually increases through mining or staking, Shiba Inu was launched with an initial supply of one quadrillion tokens. The large supply meant the nominal price of each SHIB token was very low, which helped the project attract investors as the coin appeared to be “cheap”.
However, people who buy coins because they have a “cheap” price typically fail to consider market capitalization and have unrealistic expectation for how high the price of the token could go.
For instance, if SHIB reached a price of $1 at the current supply, its market cap would be over $500 trillion, more than the combined GDP of all the world’s countries. This will obviously not happen—the only was 1 SHIB could be worth $1 is if the supply of the token is reduced drastically.
It’s worth keeping in mind that burning tokens alone will not necessarily increase the value of the coin. However, if burning is accompanied by market demand for buying, it can have a positive impact on the price.
When did Shiba Inu start coin burning?
The token burn was not initially included in the Shiba Inu whitepaper, WoofPaper. This means it was not something that was planned from the very beginning. The first major Shiba Inu burn happened in June 2021 when Vitalik Buterin, who was gifted a large amount of SHIB when the token launched, burned 41% of the Shiba Inu supply.
Of the one quadrillion token created, Buterin got 50% as a gift from Shiba Inu creator, Ryoshi. He sold about 9% to raise money for a fund tackling the COVID pandemic in India and then sent the rest to a dead wallet. That move alone dropped Shiba Inu circulating supply by almost half, and it also made the token more popular.
Since then, the Shiba Inu community has been particular about SHIB burning. On April 23, 2022, the developers of Shiba Inu finally launched the Shib burn portal. However, there is still no Shiba Inu coin burn scheduled, which means that amount of Shiba Inu burned within a month continues to vary.
How Many Shiba Inu Coins have been burned so far?
410,382,320,615,967 tokens have been burned so far. Most of these are due to Buterin burning 41% of the supply. But there have also been a lot of community burns, with over 180 billion SHIB burned. The burns happen through different initiatives. For example, Bigger Entertainment, a crypto record label, burned over one billion SHIB through various efforts, including the SHIB Burner playlist. The record label has now left the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
But there are still other projects, such as NFT games, using the concept of Play to burn to reduce the supply of SHIB. A popular one is the Brick Burner mobile game by Travis Johnson. The game uses its ad revenue to burn SHIB tokens and has now burned more than 2.5 billion SHIB. Other efforts happen within the community and even outside. While not all those who promise to burn SHIB do, the community effort to burn SHIB is intense. The last Shiba Inu coin burn today happened 20 hours and involved the burning of 424,354 SHIB.
Upcoming Shiba Inu burn mechanism
Shiba Inu developers also have several plans that will allow more SHIB to be burned. This includes the Shiba Inu Metaverse, where landowners will burn SHIB when they rename their property. Other upcoming Shiba Inu projects, such as Shibarium and ShibaSwap 2.0, will also include a burning mechanism.