Shiba Inu Token is one of three Ethereum-based tokens native to the Shiba Inu ecosystem. The ERC-20 token takes the ticker symbol SHIB on exchanges. SHIB and its surrounding ecosystem is a community-focused cryptocurrency project.
Central to the Shiba Inu ecosystem will be an automated market maker decentralized exchange protocol, ShibaSwap. Like other AMM DEXs, SHIB and the ecosystem's two complimentary tokens will create incentives to provide liquidity to the platform.
Named after the breed of dog made famous by meme culture and adopted by Dogecoin, the project has quickly found a solid support base. The so-called ShibaArmy often uses a beret-wearing Shiba Inu as part of their social media presence.
The project's "Woofpaper" — a play on "white paper" — also details a "GrrrList." On it are centralized exchange wallet addresses, which are blacklisted from receiving any rewards offered by the protocol.
In addition to the ecosystem's blockchain functionality, the community encourages its members to help real Shiba Inu dogs using Amazon Smile donations.
SHIB price and tokenomics
SHIB's tokenomics has gained it the nickname the "Dogecoin killer." Its 1 quadrillion total supply is intended to keep the SHIB price below the $0.01 mark even if its total market cap grows significantly. Many attribute the popularity of DOGE to its consistently low price and the theory that investors prefer to buy many whole units over fractions of higher valued tokens.
Of the 1 quadrillion total SHIB supply, 50% were sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's wallet. Buterin later committed to donate around 90 trillion SHIB tokens to charities, before moving the more than 410 trillion SHIB remaining in his wallet to a genuine burn address.
The team claims to have permanently locked the other 50% of SHIB supply on Uniswap by destroying the private keys to redeem it.
The ecosystem's two other tokens are called BONE and LEASH. In contrast to SHIB's enormous supply, there are just over 100,000 LEASH tokens. Meanwhile, BONE has a total supply between the two at 250 million. BONE will also eventually serve as the ecosystem's governance token and will provide funding for project development.
Each of the tokens creates incentives for user participation. The ecosystem offers staking and yield-farming opportunities — known, respectively, as "burying" and "digging" in Shiba Inu community lingo.
About the founders
Not much is known about Shiba Inu Token's founder. However, in an early Medium post, what appears to be a single developer, Ryoshi, describes themself as an independent cryptocurrency trader with a fascination for decentralized communities.
Ryoshi launched SHIB in August 2020, but it remained largely unknown until Dogecoin's rising price brought it into the spotlight in 2021. Ryoshi launched the token with no team allocation as a fun project to build a community around.
An anonymous team of developers from the Shiba Inu Token community formed to build out ShibaSwap and design the ecosystem's tokenomics during the DOGE hype of early 2021. The team released the project's documentation in late April 2021. As of May, ShibaSwap is being audited in preparation for launch.
