Buy Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu is a memecoin: a cryptocurrency built around an internet joke and a community rather than around a product, a business or a cash flow. SHIB is its token, and it runs as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum rather than on a blockchain of its own.

That is the honest starting point, and it matters more than anything else on this page. Memecoins are among the most volatile assets in a volatile market, and their value depends almost entirely on attention. Our guide to memecoins explains the category, and our guide to Ethereum covers the network SHIB actually lives on.

Where did Shiba Inu come from?

SHIB launched in August 2020, created by a pseudonymous founder or group known only as Ryoshi, who described the project as an experiment in spontaneous community building. A quadrillion tokens were created at the start, and roughly half of them were sent, unsolicited, to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

That decision shaped the asset. In May 2021 Buterin burned the large majority of the tokens he had been sent by moving them to an address nobody can spend from, and donated much of the remainder to a COVID-19 relief fund in India. It remains by far the largest reduction in SHIB's supply, and it happened because of one person's choice rather than anything in the code.

Ryoshi walked away in 2022, deleting their posts and writing that the project did not need them. Leadership since has stayed pseudonymous, with a figure known as Shytoshi Kusama at the front of the project before stepping back from the lead role in 2025, and a small development team carrying the work. There is no company behind SHIB in the way there is behind a listed technology stock, and no board or regulator that the project answers to for its decisions.

What is SHIB, technically?

Stripped of the branding, SHIB is a simple token contract on Ethereum.

It is an ERC-20 token. SHIB transactions are Ethereum transactions, confirmed by Ethereum validators, with fees paid in ETH rather than in SHIB. Its supply is fixed and can only fall. The full supply was created at launch and there is no protocol mechanism that produces more. Burns can reduce it. Nothing can add to it. It carries no rights and pays nothing. Holding SHIB does not entitle you to revenue, dividends, interest or a claim on any asset. There is no protocol income distributed to holders. It is not a governance token for Ethereum or for its own chain. SHIB has no consensus role at all.

What is Shibarium?

Shibarium is a separate blockchain built by the Shiba Inu team, and it is where most of the project's development effort has gone. It is a layer two network that settles to Ethereum, is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and uses a proof of stake validator set modeled on Polygon's design, with validators periodically posting checkpoints to Ethereum. Our guide to blockchain layers explains how layer twos relate to the networks beneath them.

Two things about it are commonly misunderstood.

Shibarium does not make SHIB a layer one asset. SHIB remains an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The token used to pay for transactions and to stake on Shibarium is BONE, not SHIB.

Its security rests on its validators, not on mathematics. Shibarium does not use validity proofs or fraud proofs to guarantee that what its validators submit to Ethereum is correct. The validator set is small, and control of a supermajority of it is effectively control of the bridge. Independent research site L2BEAT documents those trust assumptions.

Its record reflects that. Shibarium's mainnet launch in August 2023 stalled within a day under transaction load, with funds stuck in its bridge for a period before the network was restarted. In September 2025 the bridge was exploited: an attacker gained control of most of the validator signing keys, used a large flash loan of BONE to push voting power past the network's approval threshold, and signed fraudulent checkpoints to withdraw assets. Several million dollars of assets were taken, a portion was frozen or trapped, and functions were paused while the team responded. The Shiba Inu documentation describes how the network is meant to work, and reading it alongside that history is a reasonable exercise before treating Shibarium as settled infrastructure.

What are BONE, LEASH and the rest of the ecosystem?

The project has produced a number of assets and products around SHIB. They are separate things, and owning SHIB does not give you any of them.

BONE. The gas and staking token for Shibarium, and the token used for ecosystem voting. LEASH. A deliberately tiny supply token from the early days, now used mainly for access and perks within the ecosystem. TREAT. A later governance and utility token, launched in 2025, intended to support other parts of the ecosystem. ShibaSwap. A decentralized exchange run by the project, operating on both Ethereum and Shibarium. Shiboshis and the metaverse. A non-fungible token collection, and a virtual world that has been in early access for an extended period. SHI. A proposed stablecoin that has been discussed for years and has not launched. The team has pointed to stablecoin regulation as the reason for the delay. Treat it as an intention rather than a product.

Delivery in this ecosystem has been slow and announcements have repeatedly run ahead of releases. That pattern is part of what you are assessing.

Do SHIB burns actually reduce the supply?

Burning means sending tokens to an address that has no known private key, so they can never be moved again. SHIB burns happen in two ways.

Some are automated. A share of the base transaction fee collected on Shibarium is used to buy SHIB and burn it, and that process runs on its own once a threshold is reached. Others are discretionary: community campaigns and one off burns announced by the project or by third parties.

The important point is one of scale. SHIB's supply is measured in hundreds of trillions of tokens. Fee driven burns remove a rounding error against that base, and would need to run at a completely different order of magnitude, for a very long time, to change the supply picture in a way a holder would notice. No burn mechanism sets or guarantees a price, and nothing in the design commits to reducing the supply by any particular amount.

What are the risks of holding SHIB?

No underlying business. SHIB produces no revenue and holds no assets. There is no earnings figure, no balance sheet and no cash flow to value it against, so there is no floor set by fundamentals. Sentiment driven pricing. Memecoin prices move with attention, social media activity, listings and broader market risk appetite. Attention is not a durable asset and can leave quickly. Extreme volatility and drawdowns. SHIB has fallen very sharply from previous highs, and long periods of decline are a normal feature of the asset rather than an anomaly. Concentration. A meaningful share of the supply sits in a small number of addresses, including exchange wallets. Large holders can move the market. Pseudonymous, informal governance. Key decisions are made by a small group operating under pseudonyms. There is no disclosure obligation, no audited reporting and no accountability mechanism if plans change. Ecosystem and delivery risk. Much of the case for SHIB rests on the ecosystem built around it. That ecosystem has a documented history of delays, and Shibarium has had a failed launch and a serious bridge exploit. Competition. New memecoins launch constantly and cost nothing to create. Attention rotates between them. Limited investor protection. Memecoins sit largely outside the frameworks that govern regulated investments. There is no prospectus, no licensed issuer and no conduct regime standing behind the token itself. No government compensation. Digital assets are not deposits. They are not insured by the FDIC and they are not protected by SIPC. If you lose value, there is no compensation scheme to fall back on.

Buying SHIB with US dollars on CoinJar

CoinJar has operated since 2013 and lists SHIB against US dollars, so you can buy, sell and hold it without converting through another cryptocurrency first. Current charges are on our fees page, and live US dollar rates are on our cryptocurrency prices page.

CoinJar, Inc. is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, NMLS ID 2492913, and holds money transmitter licenses in a growing number of states. You can check whether CoinJar operates in your state before signing up.

How is SHIB taxed in the US?

The IRS generally treats SHIB as property. A taxable event can occur when you sell it for US dollars, exchange it for another cryptoasset, spend it or give it away.

The IRS explains these rules on its digital assets page. Our guide to downloading a transaction history report for tax shows how to get the records you need. This is general information, not tax advice. Consider speaking to a qualified tax professional about your circumstances.