Shiba Inu price prediction: “Yours truly”, the developer answers when asked who pays for Shibarium

The short answer first: by his own account, the running of the Shiba Inu blockchain Shibarium is paid for out of the private pocket of one of the project’s developers. Shiba Inu is trading at $0.00000566 on Saturday lunchtime, a good four percent lower than on Friday. Anyone looking for a Shiba Inu price prediction today runs into price targets between $0.00001 and $0.01 almost everywhere. This piece does the arithmetic on what such targets demand in market capitalisation, how much the frequently cited scarcity from burned tokens contributes to them, and what you as an investor in Germany actually have in your hands today.

“Yours truly”: what the Shiba Inu developer said about funding Shibarium

On October 2 the user Ed Salomons asked on the platform X who actually pays for the maintenance, security and further development of Shibarium. The prompt was another Ethereum network announcing it would shut down because its running costs no longer covered themselves. Kaal Dhairya, one of the best-known developers in the Shiba Inu orbit, answered with two words: “Yours truly”. The trade outlet U.Today documented the exchange.

Shibarium is what is known as a layer 2, a separate blockchain that bundles transactions and passes the result on to Ethereum so that fees stay low. For Shiba Inu this network is more than a technical add-on. It is the engine with which the project intends to make its token scarce: part of the fees arising on Shibarium is swapped into SHIB and then sent to an address from which nobody can retrieve anything. The project calls this destruction a burn.

Dhairya names no sum, no period and no second party helping to pay. That is the decisive point for any assessment. A statement of this kind demonstrates commitment; it does not demonstrate sustainable funding. Anyone deriving a price target from it should label that openly as an assumption.

Why funding a layer 2 is not a side issue

A layer 2 needs machines that produce blocks, nodes that keep data available, regular security audits and a team that responds to incidents. Those costs arise every day, regardless of how many people use the network. They are normally funded from transaction fees, from a project treasury or from venture capital. If all that is left is one individual’s private wealth, that is a risk factor belonging in any honest Shiba Inu price prediction.

Shibarium in numbers: 2,288 transactions a day and $55,760 in its applications

Figures say more here than declarations of intent. Shibarium’s public block explorer records 2,288 transactions for October 3. In total the chain has counted 612,871,998 transactions and 254,800,547 addresses since its launch, spread across 10,537,692 blocks. The average time between two blocks is around 7.4 seconds, the gas price 0.26 Gwei, and the reported network load zero percent.

The picture is even clearer for the capital sitting in applications on Shibarium. The data service DefiLlama puts that at around $55,760 on October 3. For comparison: that is less than a single mid-sized purchase moves on a crypto exchange. These figures rest on the chain’s public block explorer and DefiLlama’s chain overview, both read for October 3, 2026. cryptoticker.io compiled this data itself on October 3, 2026.

Two things about that matter for the prediction. First, a chain with 2,288 transactions a day generates hardly any fees, and therefore hardly any material for burning tokens. Second, a chain with $55,760 in its applications attracts no developers who would in turn generate usage. The two points reinforce each other.

Why the Blast shutdown matters for the Shiba Inu price prediction

The comparison is a fresh one. The Ethereum network Blast has announced it will cease operations; its token stands around 98 percent below its high, and balances have to be withdrawn. We described the case in a separate piece on October 3: Blast is being shut down and users should withdraw their holdings now.

That case was precisely what prompted the question to Dhairya. Both networks share the same underlying problem: the costs keep running and usage does not cover them. The difference lies in the backing. Blast hung on a project treasury that eventually ran dry. On the strength of the October 2 statement, Shibarium hangs on one person. Both are vulnerable, and an investor should know both before taking seriously a price target built on growing network usage.

In fairness: a shutdown of Shibarium is nowhere on the table, and nobody has announced one. The point is a different one. A network whose operation depends on a single funder cannot keep its scarcity machine running indefinitely if the fees fail to appear.

The burn rate against the circulating supply: 2.8 million SHIB in a day

Now to the arithmetic against which every price target has to be measured. The burn counter Shibburn records 2,801,666 SHIB burned over the past 24 hours. Since the launch, 410,844,457,086,812 tokens have been destroyed in total, a good 41 percent of the original supply of one quadrillion.

Today’s circulating supply is given slightly differently by the data services: Shibburn says 585.47 trillion SHIB, CoinGecko 589.24 trillion. Both figures stand side by side here deliberately, rather than being merged into one neat number. Calculated with the smaller of the two, a day like this one removes 0.00000048 percent of the circulating supply.

An extrapolation shows what that means. At this pace it takes around 5,700 years for a single percent of today’s circulating supply to be burned. Even if a hundred times as much disappeared every day, around 280 million SHIB, it would still take a good 57 years to reach that one percent. The scarcity is real, but for the foreseeable future it is not a force that carries a price.

Anyone arguing from the burn is therefore arguing above all about sentiment and attention. That is a legitimate argument, but a short-term one, and it is no substitute for demand.

What price targets of $0.0001 or $0.01 demand in market capitalisation

The second calculation is even simpler and is still rarely done. Market capitalisation is price times circulating supply. With the 589.24 trillion tokens CoinGecko reports for October 3, these are the sums involved:

• $0.00001 per SHIB corresponds to around $5.9 billion in market capitalisation.
• $0.0001 corresponds to around $58.9 billion.
• $0.001 corresponds to around $589 billion.
• $0.01, the much-invoked target of one cent, corresponds to around $5.9 trillion.

For context: Bitcoin comes to around $1.7 trillion on the same day. A SHIB price of one cent would therefore demand a valuation at three and a half times today’s Bitcoin. Shiba Inu currently stands at $3.34 billion, which puts it 36th among the largest cryptocurrencies.

This calculation refutes no price target; it places one in context. A target of $0.00001 demands a near doubling of today’s valuation and is thus a perfectly ordinary market move. A target of $0.01 demands a reordering of the entire crypto market. Anyone reading both numbers as a prediction in the same breath should know that three orders of magnitude lie between them.

Shiba Inu price today: $0.00000566 and the range of the past 24 hours

As of Saturday, October 3, one SHIB costs $0.00000566, or 0.00000503 euros. Over the past 24 hours the price moved between $0.00000553 and $0.00000595, a loss of around 4.4 percent. Over the week it is down around 4.5 percent, while over the month it is up a good 9 percent. Turnover stands at around $82 million. These figures come from CoinGecko.

The price is a long way from its record. The all-time high of $0.00008616 dates from October 27, 2021. From today, around 93 percent is missing, or put differently: the price would have to rise more than fifteenfold. That this record is almost exactly five years old is not unimportant when placing a prediction in context.

As orientation on the downside there is the daily low at $0.00000553, and below it the round level of $0.0000050. On the upside the daily high sits at $0.00000595, followed by the $0.0000060 level, which has acted as a lid several times recently. These levels are points to watch, not promises; they follow from the trading range of the past few days.

Holding period and threshold: what applies to SHIB gains in Germany

Here lies the part you can actually influence today. In Germany, gains from selling cryptocurrencies count as private disposals under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. The holding period is decisive: if more than a year lies between purchase and sale, the gain stays tax-free. Anyone selling within a year pays tax on the gain at their personal income tax rate.

On top of that comes the threshold. Since the 2024 tax year, gains from private disposals remain tax-free as long as they stay below 1,000 euros in total for the calendar year. The word threshold is to be taken literally: exceed it by one euro and you pay tax on the whole amount, not merely on the excess.

For SHIB this matters particularly, because many holdings have grown out of several small purchases. Each individual purchase has its own date and therefore its own deadline. Anyone selling today should first check which partial holdings have already passed the one-year mark. The tax office generally calculates on a first in, first out basis.

One more note on the end of the year: December 31 is the cut-off date on which a calendar year’s gains and losses can be set against each other. Anyone carrying losses from other private disposals can place them against gains. That decision falls in December, but it is prepared now.

Buying under MiCA, the spread and custody for a token worth fractions of a cent

Since the European MiCA regulation applies in full, providers may only offer crypto services in Germany with authorisation. In practice that means: buy through a provider that is authorised in the EU and says so. An overview of the regulated trading venues is given in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

With a token costing $0.00000566, the gap between the buying and selling price deserves particular attention. That gap is called the spread. On tiny amounts it often weighs more heavily in percentage terms than the stated trading fee. Add both together before you buy and compare the result, not the fee figure alone.

On custody: SHIB is a token on Ethereum, so holdings can be kept in any wallet that supports Ethereum. Anyone holding larger amounts should separate custody from the exchange. Anyone holding small amounts has to weigh whether the network fee for a withdrawal is worth it at all; on amounts in the tens of euros it can eat a noticeable part of the holding.

Bull case and bear case for the Shiba Inu price prediction

The bull case rests on three points. First, SHIB has gained a good 9 percent over the month and has thus shown more resilience than today’s daily loss suggests. Second, the October 2 statement is a signal that development continues, even if the funding is thin. Third, meme tokens historically react strongly to general market phases; when the wider market picks up, SHIB is often among the names with the larger swing.

The bear case rests on the figures above. A chain with 2,288 transactions a day and $55,760 in its applications generates hardly any fees. Without fees there is no meaningful burn, and without the burn the most important argument for higher price targets falls away. Added to that is the open question of how long funding from a private pocket can hold.

Both cases are scenarios, not forecasts. Holding them against each other leads to a sober assessment: moves of a few tens of percent are possible at SHIB at any time and depend above all on the wider market. A lasting jump by an order of magnitude, by contrast, needs demand for which today’s network data offers no evidence.

Shiba Inu price prediction: the key points for your decision

The situation can be summed up in one sentence: the price hangs on the wider market, the scarcity from burning is arithmetically too small to change that, and the funding of the project’s own network has been an open question since October 2. Three steps follow from this:

1. Sort the holding periods of your partial holdings. Check which purchases have already passed the one-year mark and how close you are to the 1,000 euro threshold. Tools for that are in the comparison of tax and portfolio tools.
2. Weigh custody against costs. Check whether your holding is large enough for a wallet of your own to be worth it, and what the withdrawal costs. The devices in the hardware wallet comparison differ above all in handling and price.
3. Watch network data rather than price targets. Transactions per day and the capital tied up in applications say more about the coming months than a number with four zeros. Suitable tools are in the comparison of analytics platforms.

(As of October 3, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)