Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a popular digital currency born as the memecoin rival of Dogecoin (DOGE), Elon Musk’s beloved dog-themed currency.

The SHIB token had a rather chaotic bullish rally in 2021 as fear of missing out (FOMO) invaded users into buying a currency that was reaching unbelievable heights. In October of that year, SHIB reached a peak price of $0.00002913, or a 43.8 million percent increase. You read that right, a 43.8 million percent price jump since its creation in August 2020.

Undoubtedly, SHIB has drawn a lot of attention. However, one prominent question is: how much SHIB has been burned? Does it have a burning mechanism?

Explaining SHIB’s Burn Mechanism

Shiba Inu doesn’t have a specific token-burning schedule. But in April 2022, the Shiba Inu burn portal was announced, allowing SHIB holders to burn their tokens and receive burn rewards.

The burn rate was already high for SHIB. In March, 6 billion SHIB were destroyed, a number that reached 10 billion individual burns in April —before the advent of the Shiba Inu portal. 

Shiba Inu has three burn addresses. These are part of the Ethereum network and are also used for other tokens. A burn address is an address that isn’t controlled by anyone, which means that once tokens are sent, they are effectively being removed from circulation.

  • The first burn address is the most used one since Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin used it to burn the $6.7 billion SHIB tokens at the time, after being sent half of the cryptocurrency’s supply when it was created.
  • The second burn address is the one used by the ShibaSwap team, which is a decentralised exchange (DEX).
  • The third burn address is called the Black Hole, and it’s the one used for remaining Shiboshi’s non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

How Much SHIB Has Been Burned?

At the time of writing, over 70 billion SHIB have been burned. This is over 40% of the total SHIB supply. It should be noted that Buterin is responsible for most of the burned SHIB, as, in May 2021, he received 500 trillion SHIB as some kind of gift from developers.

He burned 410.24 trillion SHIB, and the rest he donated to an India COVID-19 relief fund created by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

Most in the crypto community cherished Buterin’s decision, to which he had to say: “I don’t want to be a locus of power of that kind” and that he would rather crypto developers give their coins/tokens to charities instead of crypto figures.

SHIB Burn Roadmap

Here’s a quick rundown of upcoming SHIB burns:

  • All SHIB holders will be able to burn their SHIB through the renaming of real estate in Shiba’s metaverse.
  • All Shiba Inu platforms, including layer-2s and decentralized exchanges such as Shibarium, Shibaswap, and Shibanet will also feature a burning mechanism.
  • NOWPayments features a burn mechanism for merchants, and SHIB partners have used the service to burn SHIB tokens.

The Shiba Inu community also burns tokens through its own initiatives in a number of ways. One project, for example, uses affiliate revenue from Amazon to burn tokens, while another publishes playlists and uses the revenue generated from it to burn more SHIB.

FAQ

What does it mean to burn a coin/token?

Burning is the act of sending a certain amount of cryptocurrency to a wallet that can only receive assets (called “dead coin wallets” or “null addresses”). This way, the coins are effectively removed from circulation and the overall supply.

What is SHIB’s total supply?

SHIB currently has a 589 trillion total supply.

How much SHIB has been burned? 

So far, 410.4 trillion SHIB has been burned, and most of these tokens were sent to the dead Ethereum wallet first used by Buterin to burn the $6.7 billion SHIB. Other token burning initiatives have moved a significant amount of SHIB from circulation, but these have come nowhere near Buterin’s contribution.

Image Source

Featured image via Pixabay.