Shiba Inu: The 'Doge Killer' That Almost Did It

In May 2021 the co-founder of Ethereum found himself holding a pile of tokens worth billions of dollars on paper, and he had not paid a cent for it. Vitalik Buterin had been sent half of all the Shiba Inu tokens in existence, unasked, by someone he had never met. He gave about a billion dollars' worth to Covid relief in India and destroyed almost all the rest.

That gift, and what Buterin did with it, is the most important thing that ever happened to SHIB, the coin launched as the "Dogecoin killer". Five months later it was briefly worth more than Dogecoin itself, at about $40 billion. In mid-October 2026 it was worth about $3 billion.

A coin with no owner

Shiba Inu appeared in August 2020, the work of a pseudonymous founder calling themselves Ryoshi. It is a token on Ethereum, which means it is not its own blockchain but an entry in Ethereum's ledger, the way a company's shares are entries in a share register. Ryoshi called it an experiment in "decentralised community building": no pre-sale to investors, no stake kept by the founder.

The supply was absurd by design: one quadrillion tokens, a thousand million million. About half went into a trading pool on Uniswap, a decentralised exchange where anyone can swap one token for another without a broker. The other half, roughly 500 trillion SHIB, was sent to Buterin's public wallet. The idea, widely read as a marketing trick, was that a coin held by Ethereum's founder would look endorsed by him, and that with the creator holding nothing, nobody could dump on buyers.

Trading started on 1 August 2020 at a price so small it barely registered. One wallet bought about $8,000 worth on day one. By 27 October 2021, as SHIB peaked, that stake was valued at about $5.7 billion, a figure Morning Brew called possibly the greatest trade of all time. It was a paper value: selling a holding that size into the market would have crushed the price.

Vitalik's billion

By May 2021 the memecoin boom led by Dogecoin had lifted SHIB too, and Buterin's unwanted pile was worth billions. India was suffering a devastating Covid-19 wave. On 12 May Buterin gave 500 ether to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, set up by Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of the Polygon network. Then he sent the fund about 50 trillion SHIB, valued at more than $1 billion at the time.

He then burned 410 trillion SHIB, about 90% of what he held, by sending it to an address nobody controls. Burning a token is like a company cancelling its own shares: they still exist on the register but can never be traded again. On paper the burned tokens were worth about $6.7 billion. Buyers cheered, because fewer tokens in circulation looked good for the price.

The donation was never going to be worth its headline figure. The market for SHIB was far too thin to absorb a billion dollars of selling. DL News later reported that the trading firm Wintermute turned the SHIB into about $464 million of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the dollar, about half the paper value. In January 2022 Nailwal sent $100 million back to Buterin so he could give it out faster as a non-Indian, and Buterin set up the Balvi fund to back Covid and medical science research with it.

Passing Dogecoin

The publicity helped. SHIB was listed on Coinbase, the biggest US crypto exchange, in September 2021. In October it rose about 700% in a month. On 27 October The Block reported that SHIB's market value, about $39.3 billion on CoinGecko's data, had overtaken Dogecoin's $31.4 billion. The next day it hit its all-time high of about $0.000086 per token. A petition asking the trading app Robinhood to list it passed 500,000 signatures in November.

The lead did not last. Within days Dogecoin was back in front, and the 2022 crypto crash took both coins down. SHIB had become a household name, but the "Dogecoin killer" never killed Dogecoin.

Ryoshi did not stay for the fall. In late May 2022 the founder deleted their tweets and their Medium blog, including a post titled "I AM RYOSHI". The project was left to its lead developer, who goes by the pseudonym Shytoshi Kusama. "Though I don't know his identity, his legacy lives on in the Shib token," Kusama wrote.

Building a chain, and losing money on it

Kusama's team tried to turn the memecoin into a business. It added an exchange, ShibaSwap, and two more tokens, BONE and LEASH, and then built Shibarium, its own network running alongside Ethereum, a layer 2 in the jargon, meant to make SHIB transactions cheaper.

The launch on 16 August 2023 went badly. Within a day about 1,000 ether, around $1.7 million to $1.8 million, was stuck in the bridge that moves tokens between Ethereum and Shibarium, according to The Block and Decrypt. The team blamed a "MASSIVE influx" of users.

On 12 September 2025 the same bridge was robbed. The attacker borrowed 4.6 million BONE in a flash loan, a loan taken and repaid within a single transaction, and appears to have gained control of 10 of the 12 validator keys that approve bridge withdrawals. Estimates of the haul ranged from about $2.4 million (Forklog) to about $4.1 million (The Block, citing a community update), in ether, SHIB and other tokens. Developer Kaal Dhairya called it "a sophisticated, probably planned for months attack". K9 Finance, a project on Shibarium, blocked the attacker from selling about $700,000 of its KNINE tokens. The team rotated the keys, offered the attacker a reward that was not taken, and promised a compensation plan for users.

By 2026 the project was quiet. Kusama posted little after May, and Dhairya told holders the year would be about "repair, focus, and building something that can actually last". In mid-October 2026 SHIB traded at about $0.0000052, CoinGecko data showed, about 94% below its October 2021 peak, with a market value near $3 billion. Dogecoin, the coin it was built to kill, was worth about four times as much.