Cryptocurrency returns have been a mixed bag in 2025. Industry leaders like Bitcoin and Ethereum are sitting on solid gains of more than 30%, but the speculative end of the market isn't faring so well. Dogecoin is down 25% on the year, and Shiba Inu (SHIB -15.21%) is nursing a 44% loss.
Shiba Inu was created by an anonymous developer named Ryoshi in 2020, who wanted to give investors an alternative to other meme tokens like Dogecoin. It wound up surging by 45,278,000% in 2021, which remains one of the best annual returns in the history of the financial markets. In fact, it would have turned a perfectly timed investment of just $3 into more than $1 million.
Shiba Inu's peak price in 2021 was $0.000086, and it's currently trading 87% below that level at just $0.000012. Could 2026 be the year it stages another historic run, and potentially crosses the coveted $1 milestone? The answer will make your head spin.
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Shiba Inu's fundamentals are on shaky ground
Cryptocurrency was once promoted as a viable alternative to traditional money, but none of the coins or tokens in the market today are showing signs of generating widespread traction among businesses or consumers.
However, some cryptocurrencies are creating value in other ways; Bitcoin is popular in the investment community as a digital store of value because of its capped supply and decentralized structure, and the Ethereum network is a leading destination for developers looking to build decentralized finance apps.
Shiba Inu, on the other hand, still hasn't found a true use case. Only 1,079 businesses accept it as payment for goods and services worldwide (according to crypto directory CryptWerk), so consumers have no incentive to own it because they can't spend it at their favorite stores. Plus, it clearly isn't a very good store of value because it hasn't made a new high in four years.
As a result, the meme coin tends to rise and fall at the whims of speculators, which makes it a very unpredictable investment.
Shiba Inu's enormous supply is a barrier to further upside
Aside from Shiba Inu's lack of utility, there is another issue standing in the way of further gains: its enormous supply. There are 589.5 trillion coins in circulation, which is why each one trades at such a microscopic price. Even still, Shiba Inu has a market capitalization of about $7 billion, which is noteworthy for a cryptocurrency with no use case.
If Shiba Inu were to rise to $1 per token, simple math dictates that its market capitalization would be a whopping $589.5 trillion. Therefore, it would be 130 times more valuable than Nvidia, which is the world's largest company with a market cap of about $4.5 trillion. Shiba Inu would also be worth five times more than the output of the entire global economy, which was $111 trillion last year.
To be blunt, Shiba Inu has absolutely no chance of reaching $1 in its current state. The numbers just don't make sense.
However, the community is trying to solve the supply problem by "burning" tokens, which means removing them from circulation forever by sending them to a dead wallet where they can never be retrieved. Technically speaking, the price per token should increase in proportion to the number of tokens burned, which could clear a path to the $1 milestone.
It will take a head-spinning amount of time to burn enough tokens
As I just mentioned, based on Shiba Inu's current price of $0.000012 per token and the total supply of 589.5 trillion tokens, its market cap is $7 billion. If the Shiba Inu community burned 99.99998% of that total supply and left just 7 billion tokens remaining, that would, in theory, drive the price per token from to $1.
However, since Shiba Inu's market cap would be exactly the same as it is now, nobody would make any money because no actual value would have been created. Even though each token would be worth $1, each investor would have 99.99998% fewer tokens, offsetting any potential gains.
But here's the part that will make your head spin: Only 22.3 million tokens were burned last month, translating to an annualized rate of 267.6 million tokens. That means at the current pace, it will take more than 2.2 million years to burn all the tokens required to warrant a price of $1, so we certainly won't be here when it happens.
But even if your future descendants inherit your tokens, 2,200 millennia worth of inflation will have eroded any value that remains.
