Shiba Inu: $3.0 billion market cap against $46,453 on Shibarium

Shiba Inu is valued at $2.998 billion on Friday evening. On Shibarium, the project's own blockchain, $46,453 sits at the same hour. The token's market capitalisation is therefore roughly 64,500 times the value working on the blockchain it is meant to fund.

Here is the evidence: DefiLlama reports $46,453 in the protocols on Shibarium for October 23; a year ago the figure was $816,615. Our own assessment follows further down in a section of its own, with the figures that argue for and against.

Shibarium: where the project's own blockchain stands

Shiba Inu trades at $0.00000509 on Friday evening, or €0.00000454, and is 2.9 percent above Thursday evening's level. The day's high was $0.00000513, the low $0.00000491. Over 30 days the token is down 9.6 percent, over twelve months down 50.1 percent. It remains 94.1 percent below its record of October 27, 2021, when it reached $0.00008616. A market capitalisation of $2.998 billion is good for 35th place, and daily turnover stands at $64.96 million. All figures date from October 23 at around 18:40 UTC.

Shibarium is a layer-2 blockchain. A layer 2 is a separate blockchain that hands its results to a larger blockchain at regular intervals, in Shibarium's case to Ethereum, and can therefore offer cheaper fees than that larger chain. Shibarium went live on August 28, 2023, and it was supposed to give the project a use beyond simply holding the token. Payments on it are made in BONE, the project's second token, not in SHIB.

Total value locked, or TVL, measures how much money users have deposited into a blockchain's applications, for instance into a trading venue or a lending market. It is not a price and not a valuation but a quantity: the higher it stands, the more capital trusts that blockchain's applications. On August 29, 2023, the first day DefiLlama records, the figure was $1,272,456. Today it is $46,453, or 3.7 percent of that starting value.

The $46,453 measured against the token's figures

The value on Shibarium equals 0.0016 percent of SHIB's market capitalisation. Set against trading, the contrast is sharper still: SHIB turns over $64.96 million a day, roughly 1,400 times the sum sitting on its own blockchain. Anyone buying SHIB moves a multiple of what the project's blockchain holds in total, in a single day.

BONE, Shibarium's gas token, costs $0.055032 and carries a market capitalisation of $13.75 million. SHIB's market capitalisation is 218 times as high. Daily turnover in BONE is $280,743. That figure matters more in practice than the price: paying for transactions on Shibarium requires BONE, and a market with barely $281,000 of daily turnover will not absorb a larger order without moving the price.

676 transactions a day: the real volume on Shibarium

The blockchain's public explorer, Shibariumscan, counted 676 transactions on October 22, the last full day. Across the month from September 22 to October 22 the total comes to 62,193 transactions, an average of 2,006 a day and a median of 1,323. The weakest day was October 17 with 650, the strongest October 19 with 7,296.

That range tells more than the average does. A factor of eleven between the weakest and the strongest day inside a single month means individual events carry the numbers, not steady operation. The blockchain has produced 11,713,585 blocks so far, one block every 5.02 seconds on average. On the arithmetic of recent weeks, that leaves fewer than 0.04 transactions per block.

How the value shrank from $6.44 million to $46,453

The record stood at $6,437,163 on December 8, 2024. From there to today, 99.3 percent has disappeared. The decline was not even: a year ago, on October 23, 2025, $816,615 was still sitting in the protocols. The twelve-month low came in the summer, at $24,695 on July 25, 2026. The value has almost doubled since then, yet over 30 days it is down 19.7 percent again.

The largest single position sits at an exchange, not in a protocol

DefiLlama lists 21 protocols active on Shibarium. Only a few of them carry the value. The largest position among the protocols is ShibaSwap V1, the project's own trading venue, with $22,662, close to half the blockchain's total. WoofSwap follows with $8,227, PunkSwap with $1,243, ShibaSwap V2 with $1,177 and LeetSwap with $223.

Separately, DefiLlama reports $85,418 held on Shibarium by the exchange Gate. That sum does not enter the blockchain's total, because exchange balances are counted apart from it. The position is still striking: a single exchange holds almost twice as much on this blockchain as all of its applications manage together.

What has changed since the burn figures of October 22

Our article of October 22 calculated how long the current burn pace would need to take one percent of the supply out of circulation: 714 years, at 673 million tokens burned in 30 days. The price stood at $0.00000495 then and at $0.00000509 today, a gain of 2.8 percent in two days. Circulating supply is unchanged at 589.24 trillion tokens.

The burn and Shibarium are connected, and that is rarely spelled out: under the project's design, part of the fees accruing on Shibarium goes towards burning SHIB. The amount burned therefore depends on how much the blockchain is used. At 676 transactions a day that source produces practically nothing, and that explains the 714 years from Wednesday's calculation better than any look at the burn pace on its own.

BONE and SHIB: why two tokens hang on the same blockchain

For investors in Germany, the split between the two tokens is the point that matters most in practice. SHIB is the token traded on exchanges and held in almost every wallet. BONE pays for transactions on Shibarium. Move SHIB from Ethereum to Shibarium and you then need BONE to do anything there at all, and BONE has to be bought somewhere first. With daily turnover of $280,743, that route is narrow.

The second point concerns liquidity on the way out. On October 19 we measured that only 1.59 percent of SHIB trading runs in euros. On Shibarium itself, the $46,453 is a sum that a mid-sized order would already move. Selling there means meeting a thin order book; the depth sits at the large exchanges, not on the project's own blockchain. Which exchanges trade SHIB in euros, and at what fees, is set out further down.

Shibarium or Ethereum: how to find out where your SHIB sits

In most cases, SHIB that has been bought sits on Ethereum, because that is the blockchain the token was issued on in 2020 and the one every large exchange pays out to. Three details give you certainty. First, the network shown in your wallet: if it says Ethereum or ERC-20, the tokens are on Ethereum and Shibarium plays no part. Second, the gas: fees billed in ETH mean Ethereum, fees in BONE mean Shibarium. Third, the exchange's withdrawal screen: where it offers a choice of networks, Shibarium appears as an entry of its own.

The distinction has a concrete reason. A bridge between two blockchains is a program in its own right, one that locks tokens on one side and issues them on the other. If that program is lost, access is gone, even though both blockchains keep running. Anyone holding SHIB for the long term has the broader infrastructure and the deeper liquidity on Ethereum. How custody without third-party access works, and which devices handle it, is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

Tax and the holding period: what switching blockchain triggers in Germany

Under the German Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on crypto assets, a sale of privately held crypto assets is tax-free after a holding period of one year; inside that year an exemption threshold of €1,000 per year applies. What counts as a sale is the decisive question.

Transferring your own SHIB from one address to another, including from Ethereum across a bridge to Shibarium, is not a sale and does not reset the holding period, as long as the tokens stay the same and stay in your possession. Swapping SHIB for BONE, by contrast, is a sale of SHIB and a purchase of BONE: a new one-year period starts for BONE, and a gain on the SHIB side is taxable inside the year. That hits precisely the holder who wants to become active on Shibarium and buys gas to do it. Documenting both transactions with date, quantity and price therefore matters. In an individual case, your own tax adviser decides.

Our assessment of the situation at Shibarium

In this newsroom's view, Shibarium three years after launch is not an argument for the SHIB price but a position that has to be explained. The evidence: $46,453 in the protocols against $6,437,163 in December 2024, 676 transactions on October 22, a $13.75 million market capitalisation for BONE. Against that, the value has risen again since the July low of $24,695 and the blockchain runs unchanged in technical terms, with a block every 5.02 seconds and no outage in the recorded data. What follows from it: the SHIB price responds to the state of the market and to trading data, not to usage of Shibarium. Anyone holding SHIB for the sake of its own blockchain is currently holding it for an expectation rather than for an operation. None of this is a recommendation to buy or sell; with crypto assets, total loss is possible.

Shibarium: without usage, BONE stays at $13.8 million

1. Check in your wallet or in your exchange's withdrawal screen which network your SHIB sits on, and make a note of it. If they are on Ethereum, nothing needs to change. How to hold them from there without third-party access is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. If you are planning a sale, check the depth of the order book in your pair first, in euros above all. The exchange comparison lists the venues with their fees and euro pairs.
3. If you have swapped SHIB for BONE, or plan to, record the date, quantity and price on both sides. Tax software reads these transactions out of the blockchain data and builds the statement for your tax return from them.

(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)