Shiba Inu SHIB

SHIB launched in 2020 under the pseudonym Ryoshi as an ordinary ERC-20 contract on Ethereum, with no chain of its own and nothing technical to separate it from thousands of tokens built to the same standard. It became famous when half the supply was sent unsolicited to Vitalik Buterin, who burned most of it and donated the remainder.

An ecosystem grew around the name: the ShibaSwap exchange, the companion tokens LEASH and BONE, and Shibarium, a layer-two network where BONE pays fees and part of the activity is routed into burning SHIB. Initial supply ran into the quadrillions of units, which is why the per-token increment is unusually small — a consequence of the denomination, not a verdict on the project.

Demand rests on recognition and an unusually persistent community rather than on revenue or a function only this token performs, so the price follows attention to the meme segment as a whole. SHIB stays a meme token by nature, and the infrastructure around it does not change that.

The supply structure was changed less by any team decision than by the 2021 burn of the half of the supply that had been sent to Vitalik Buterin.