Shiba Inu prediction: Zama's Q2 2026 target window has passed, Shibarium holds $159,561

Most price targets for Shiba Inu rest on a single promise: Shibarium is to gain confidential smart contracts, and with them a reason to be used. The target window for that upgrade was the second quarter of 2026. It ended on June 30, and to this day there is no confirmed mainnet date.

SHIB traded at $0.00000528 on Thursday evening, the equivalent of €0.00000471. That is 2.6 percent below the level 24 hours earlier and the lowest reading of the past seven days. More telling than that figure, though, is what the chain itself currently delivers, because every forecast reaching beyond the day rests on exactly that.

Zama's target window for Shibarium: Q2 2026 ended on June 30

In December 2025, a roadmap from the encryption company Zama came to light, holding out full on-chain privacy and confidential smart contracts for Shibarium by the second quarter of 2026. Attribution is decisive here, and it belongs in any assessment: the target window came from the technology partner, not as a binding commitment from the Shiba Inu team, and it named a quarter rather than a date.

That quarter is now more than three months past. No public confirmation that the technology has reached Shibarium's mainnet can be found, and no new date either. For a forecast this is not a footnote but the core of the matter: a catalyst without a date cannot be priced in, because nobody can say which month it is supposed to act on.

Fully homomorphic encryption in one sentence

Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, is a method that lets a computer calculate with encrypted data without decrypting it first. On a public blockchain that would be the difference between a bank statement anyone can read along with and a transfer whose amount stays hidden while the network still validates it. For Shibarium it would be the first feature setting the chain apart from dozens of other layer-2 networks.

Shibarium by the numbers: 1,323 transactions a day and $159,561 in the protocol

The chain's block explorer reports 1,323 transactions for October 7. The seven days before that swing widely: 1,011 on October 1, 2,288 on the 2nd, 1,806 on the 3rd, then 4,084, 4,859 and 5,711 through October 6. That averages 3,012 transactions a day. Average block time runs at around five seconds, and the explorer counts 10.97 million blocks in total.

The second number carries more weight. The value deposited in Shibarium applications, the total value locked, comes to $159,561 according to DeFiLlama data. Not millions, but roughly $160,000. For comparison: the SHIB token itself carries a market value of $3.11 billion. The ratio between the token's value and the capital working on its own chain therefore stands at about 19,500 to 1.

You can look up both numbers yourself, at ShibariumScan for the transactions and at DeFiLlama for the deposited capital. The time of retrieval and the source belong with every figure older than a day.

Why the explorer knows only part of the blocks

One qualification has to go with this, or the number would look larger than it is. Shibarium's explorer had indexed only around 55 percent of its blocks in early October, as we showed in the Shibarium figures on October 6. The daily readings above are therefore a lower bound, not a complete count. It changes nothing about the order of magnitude: even double would still be a few thousand transactions a day.

The price since the target window: $0.00000528 and the 90-day range

Over the past 90 days, SHIB moved between $0.00000411 and $0.00000610. The 90-day average sits at $0.00000503, placing the current price around five percent above it. Measured over 30 days the picture flips: there the mean is $0.00000556, and the price trades just under five percent below.

The week itself ran in two halves. SHIB climbed to $0.00000592 by October 5, and has since eased to $0.00000528. Daily volume picked up along the way, from $68.6 million on October 7 to $90.3 million on October 8. Falling prices on rising turnover amount to a sell signal in the sense that the move is being carried, rather than arising from a lack of buyers. The token sits 93.7 percent below its all-time high.

Three checks to test a roadmap promise

Today's numbers go stale within days. What lasts is the routine for fetching them yourself at any time. Three queries are enough, and none of them needs a subscription.

First, activity. Open the chain's block explorer and look at transactions per day over several weeks, not at the daily reading. A single day says nothing; a series does. If the series fails to rise after an announced upgrade, then either the upgrade is not there or it is not being used. For the price, both come to the same thing.

Second, capital. A chain's deposited capital is harder to dress up than a transaction count, because it is real money that somebody moved. Where it sits in six figures, the chain carries no applications a price could live on.

Third, the date. Look for a specific mainnet date, not a quarter and not an announcement about an announcement. Find no date and treat the catalyst as absent. Drawing that line between what is documented and what is hoped for costs nothing and spares expensive disappointments.

Run these three queries once a month and you need no analyst's opinion to form your own view.

Two verified tokens carry the SHIB ticker on Solana: the buying route under MiCA

Since early October, SHIB also exists on Solana, as a bridged version by way of a token bridge. That sounds like a side issue and is a stumbling block in practice, because two verified tokens on Solana now carry the same ticker. Which of them is the canonical version, and how to tell them apart, we set out in detail on October 7.

In practical terms: a bridged version is not the same asset as the original token on Ethereum, because such a version depends additionally on the bridge that issues it. Should the bridge fail or come under attack, the claim on the original is affected, even if the price in your portfolio looks unchanged. Buy through a trading platform authorised in the EU and you will as a rule receive the Ethereum version, with the contract address stated in the product information.

Under the European Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, providers need an authorisation in a member state to trade SHIB. For you that is a simple preliminary check: where the provider appears in the national supervisory register, European law applies, complaints procedure included. Where it does not, you carry the risk alone in a dispute.

Holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: the bridge transaction belongs in your records

In Germany, gains from selling crypto assets fall under private disposals. After a one-year holding period the gain is tax-free; below that the exemption threshold of 1,000 euros per year applies, and above it the full gain is taxed at your personal rate. What decides the period is the acquisition date of the individual holding.

This is where the bridge to Solana becomes interesting for tax. Whether a change of chain counts as a swap, and therefore triggers a fresh holding period, has not been conclusively settled, and the tax authorities have published no clear line on it. In practice that means two things. Document every bridge transaction with date, amount and transaction ID, so that you can evidence the original purchase date if it comes to that. And expect a tax adviser to count the period conservatively from the bridge transaction while no clarification exists.

Spread your holdings across several wallets and exchanges and the acquisition dates quickly slip out of view without a tool. Which programmes track holding periods per holding and produce a report for the tax office is set out in our overview of crypto tax tools.

Custody: exchange account, software wallet and hardware wallet in practice

SHIB is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, and that determines custody. In an exchange account the token belongs to you economically but to the exchange technically, and a failure of the provider hits your holding. In your own wallet you hold the key yourself and take on responsibility for backing up the recovery words.

With small amounts that trade-off is quickly settled, because transaction costs on Ethereum can make a move expensive. With four-figure amounts the calculation flips, because the price of a hardware wallet is then small against the risk of a provider failure.

Liquidity and fees: $90.3 million daily turnover against a $3.11 billion market value

Daily turnover of $90.3 million corresponds to around 2.9 percent of the market value. For a private investor that is ample: orders in the three- and four-figure range do not move the price. The costs arise elsewhere, namely in the eighth decimal place. At a price of $0.00000528 the smallest representable price step is already worth around 0.19 percent, and the spread between the buying and selling price sits above that at many providers.

With SHIB, then, calculate in percent of total costs rather than in percent of price movement. A trading fee of 0.25 percent per side plus the spread adds up to about one percent for a complete entry and exit. The price has to clear that hurdle before any gain arises at all.

Bull case and bear case: what is attributed to the upgrade

The optimistic case, as put forward in market commentary, runs as follows: should confidential execution actually reach the mainnet, Shibarium would hold a feature hardly any competing layer-2 network offers, and applications would have a reason to move there. Rising usage would increase token burning through network fees. That chain of assumptions is coherent in itself, but hangs entirely on the first link.

The cautious case needs no assumptions, only the measurement. A chain with a few thousand transactions a day and six-figure deposited capital is unattractive to application developers, and a target window that passes without a new date weakens the credibility of future announcements. In that case SHIB remains a token whose price follows general market sentiment, with no occasion of its own.

Between those two readings the decision rests on a date, not on a price target. While the date is missing, the cautious reading is the one that matches the data.

Shiba Inu prediction: $0.00000610 stays the 90-day ceiling

The 90-day high sits at $0.00000610, the low at $0.00000411. Everything that has happened since July played out inside that range, and it is the most honest frame for the coming weeks as long as no date for the upgrade exists. Three steps follow from it:

1. Fix your measuring points before you trade. Note the two values of the 90-day range and Shibarium's current transaction series. Without those starting values there is no saying in four weeks whether anything has improved. Where to read the series at no extra cost is set out in the exchange comparison.
2. Assess custody separately from the price question. A holding meant to sit for a year does not belong in an exchange account out of convenience. The devices that hold Ethereum tokens directly are listed in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Secure the holding period in your records. Keep the purchase date, the amount and every change of chain while the tax treatment of the bridge remains open. Programmes that track this per holding are shown in the tax tool overview.

(As of October 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)