Shiba Inu faces considerable hurdles on its journey toward the ambitious target of reaching a $1 valuation. As it stands, the cryptocurrency sector is struggling, with Bitcoin—the industry’s leading coin—down 8%. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is particularly hard-hit, projected to end 2025 with over a 60% loss in value. Currently trading at $0.000007 per token, this raises the question: can Shiba Inu defy the odds and achieve the elusive $1 milestone by 2026?
Launched in 2020 by an anonymous developer known as Ryoshi, Shiba Inu drew inspiration from the success of Dogecoin, the original meme token. While it generated staggering returns—45,278,000% in 2021—that wave of enthusiasm quickly dissipated, with Shiba Inu losing more than 90% of its value by mid-2022. A brief rally following a political event in late 2024 hasn’t helped it return to its peak high of $0.00009 from 2021.
The cryptocurrency market is largely dominated by assets with genuine use cases, something Shiba Inu lacks. Its high volatility undermines its effectiveness as a payment solution, resulting in only around 1,110 businesses willing to accept it. Moreover, as it hasn’t reached a new high in over four years, it fails to function as a reliable store of value. Without any organic demand, the token’s future largely hinges on another speculative frenzy, the likelihood of which remains uncertain.
The colossal supply of Shiba Inu coins presents another significant barrier to its price appreciation. Currently, there are 589.2 trillion coins in circulation. At its nominal price of $0.000007, Shiba Inu has a market cap of $4.4 billion. If the token were to hit $1, its market cap would soar to an astronomical $589.2 trillion. This figure exceeds the value of even the largest corporations, eclipsing Nvidia’s market cap of $4.4 trillion by a factor of over 130. To put this into perspective, it would also be ten times greater than the combined market capitalization of all 500 companies in the S&P 500, which amounts to $57 trillion, and far surpass the global economic output of $111 trillion from last year.
Despite the overwhelming odds, the Shiba Inu community is actively seeking solutions. Enthusiasts are working to “burn” tokens, effectively removing them from circulation by sending them to a dead wallet, thus decreasing the total supply. Theoretically, if the community manages to burn half of the circulating tokens, the token price could double, putting the $1 target back on the table.
However, the challenge is monumental. To reach $1 per token, Shiba Inu would need to burn 99.99998% of its total supply, diminishing it to just 4.4 billion coins, while maintaining its $4.4 billion market cap. This solution raises a critical issue—no real new value would be generated. Investors would find their holdings reduced by 99.99998%, negating any financial gain despite the new nominal price.
The rate at which tokens are currently being burned is also a concerning factor. In the past month, only 163 million coins were removed, resulting in an annualized burn rate of about 1.9 billion coins. At this pace, it would take an astounding 310,105 years to burn enough tokens to justify a $1 price point.
Even if investors discovered a method to endure hundreds of millennia, the inflationary impact over such a timeframe would significantly diminish any potential benefits. In summary, Shiba Inu’s path to $1 is fraught with impracticalities, underscoring the skepticism surrounding its future in the cryptocurrency market.
