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Shib (@Shibtoken) turns six on August 1, 2026, and its record reads like nothing else in crypto: a token launched with about $3,000 in liquidity that reached a peak market cap north of $37 billion, absorbed the largest token burn in history, lost its anonymous founder, built its own Layer-2 chain, survived a bridge hack, and still trades roughly 95% below its 2021 high. Days before the anniversary, the team posted a photo of its half-built website from August 2020 with a simple message: six years later, the experiment continues.
How Did $SHIB Start?
$SHIB launched on August 1, 2020, as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, created by the anonymous developer Ryoshi. There was no presale, no team allocation, and no VC round. Ryoshi minted 1 quadrillion tokens, locked half in a Uniswap pool and burned the keys, then sent the other half, 500 trillion $SHIB, to the wallet of Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin). The logic was simple: if Ethereum's co-founder held half the supply, no insider could dump on the community.
The project billed itself as a decentralized experiment and a "Dogecoin killer," run by a community that came to call itself the ShibArmy. For most of its first year, the token traded at prices with nine zeros after the decimal point.
The Buterin Burn That Defined 2021
In May 2021, the unsolicited gift became the single biggest event in $SHIB's history. Buterin first donated roughly 50 trillion $SHIB, worth over $1 billion at the time, to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund, with a further slice going to the Future of Life Institute. Days later, he burned 410.24 trillion $SHIB, about 90% of his remaining holdings and 41% of the total supply, by sending them to a dead address. The tokens were valued around $6.7 billion, making it the largest single burn crypto had seen. Buterin said he did not want to be a "locus of power" over the project.
The rest of 2021 moved fast:
- Binance listed $SHIB in May 2021, followed by Coinbase in September.
- ShibaSwap, the ecosystem's own DEX, launched in July 2021 and introduced BONE for governance alongside $LEASH.
- The Shiboshi NFT collection dropped in October 2021.
- On October 28, 2021, $SHIB hit its all-time high near $0.00008845, briefly flipping Dogecoin as the largest memecoin and entering the global top 10 by market cap.
Anyone who bought at launch was sitting on gains measured in millions of percent. It did not last. Like the rest of the 2021 memecoin class, $SHIB corrected hard through 2022 and never revisited those levels.
Who Runs $SHIB After Ryoshi?
Around May 2022, Ryoshi walked away, deleting social accounts and blog posts and leaving the token to its community. Development leadership passed to contributors, most visibly Shytoshi Kusama (@ShytoshiKusama). The same year brought a Robinhood listing in April 2022, payment integrations at AMC Theatres and Newegg, the Shiba Eternity mobile game, and early metaverse land plans.
The founder's exit completed the setup Ryoshi described from day one: a token with no owner. Whether that is a strength or a governance gap remains an open argument inside the ShibArmy.
What Has Shibarium Delivered?
The biggest infrastructure step came on August 16, 2023, when Shibarium, an Ethereum Layer-2, went live. The launch was rocky. The bridge choked on demand within hours and the chain was briefly paused before relaunching. Shibarium uses $BONE for gas and routes a share of transaction fees into automatic $SHIB burns.
Since then, the network has processed more than 1.5 billion cumulative transactions. Daily activity tells a more modest story, often running in the low hundreds to low thousands of transactions in recent months, well below earlier peaks, with gas costs near zero. $TREAT, a utility and reward token on Shibarium, followed in January 2025, and the team has floated a Layer-3 called Shib Alpha Layer along with FHE-based privacy features. Most of those plans remain in development.
How Bad Was the 2025 Bridge Exploit?
On September 12, 2025, an attacker used a flash loan to buy 4.6 million BONE, delegated the stake to gain temporary majority voting power, and compromised 10 of Shibarium's 12 validator signing keys. That two-thirds control let them push a malicious state and drain about 224.57 ETH and 92.6 billion $SHIB from the bridge, worth roughly $2.4 million, plus around $700,000 in K9 Finance's (@K9finance) $KNINE, which the K9 DAO froze by blacklisting the address.
The team paused staking and unstaking, moved stake manager funds into a 6-of-9 hardware multisig, rotated keys, and brought in security firms Hexens, Seal 911, and PeckShield. Lead developer Kaal Dhairya (@kaaldhairya) called it a sophisticated attack that likely took months to plan. BONE fell about 43% in the aftermath, and Shibarium activity and confidence took a hit. The recovery work since has included security upgrades and restitution plans for affected users.
Where Does $SHIB Stand at Six?
$SHIB trades around $0.0000046 with a market cap of $2.72 billion, holding a spot in the top 30 with 3.06 million holders. Circulating supply sits near 589.24 trillion after burns. Burn tracker Shibburn puts the running total at 410.84 trillion $SHIB destroyed, 41.08% of the original quadrillion, though Buterin's 2021 burn still accounts for nearly all of it. Community burns keep ticking along, with the largest in six months arriving in early July 2026, when roughly 110 million $SHIB went to dead wallets in a single day.
The token heads into its anniversary off a sharp late-July spike that briefly topped $0.0000055 on July 26 before cooling, leaving it up about 8.5% across the week but roughly 95% below the October 2021 high. Six years in, the ledger reads differently depending on where you look. The price sits far below 2021, but the stack around it kept growing: a DEX, a Layer-2 past 1.5 billion transactions, four ecosystem tokens, games, and a planned Layer-3 with FHE privacy features. That is more infrastructure than any memecoin of its generation has shipped, and none of it existed when Ryoshi minted a quadrillion tokens into a $3,000 pool. Year seven's job is turning that stack into daily use. The ShibArmy has taken on longer odds before.
Sources:
- CoinMarketCap Live $SHIB price, market cap, supply, and holder data.
- CoinGecko Additional market and supply data.
- Shibburn Burn tracker showing 410.84 trillion $SHIB destroyed, 41.08% of the original supply.
- Shib (@Shibtoken) Official posts including the sixth-anniversary message and the September 2025 bridge exploit updates.