Shiba Inu's burn hangs on 371 BONE: what investors need to know

Shiba Inu has been burned almost entirely by hand for days. On Saturday the counter at the tracker Shibburn showed zero tokens burned for more than 24 hours, until a single unrelated address sent 20,408,894 SHIB to the dead wallet. The reason for the standstill is not a lack of interest but a threshold of 1,000 BONE that the burn portal ShibTorch has not reached for weeks. It holds 371.37 BONE, worth around $20 at Sunday evening's price.

Shiba Inu traded at $0.00000489 on Sunday evening, 0.2 percent above the previous day, with a market value of $2.88 billion. For the price, the stalled burn is no shock this weekend. For the argument many holders use to justify their position it very much is, because scarcity is supposed to come from the protocol and not from the generosity of individual addresses.

How a burn on Shibarium comes about at all

Few holders know the mechanics behind it, and they explain the standstill better than any look at the chart. Shibarium is the second layer of Shiba Inu, a blockchain of its own on which transfers cost less than on Ethereum. Each of those transfers carries a fee, and part of those fees is converted into BONE, the fuel token of the network. That stock of BONE is the raw material for burning.

The burning itself does not happen on Shibarium but on Ethereum, where the actual SHIB contract sits. The ShibTorch portal therefore first collects BONE, swaps it into SHIB and sends that SHIB across the bridge between the two networks to an address from which nobody can retrieve anything. Only there does the operation count as a burn. Three things have to come together: enough fees on Shibarium, a working swap and an open bridge to Ethereum.

Two of those three are currently stuck.

371 of 1,000 BONE: the threshold does not trigger

The contract behind ShibTorch starts a burn only once 1,000 BONE are together. That threshold has a sober reason: every burn costs fees itself, and with small amounts little of what is burned would be left after costs. Anyone may then trigger the operation; no permission from the team is needed.

Only 371.37 BONE have come together so far, according to a report by the portal U.Today on October 22. At Sunday evening's price of $0.0534 per BONE, that is just under $20. Another 628.63 BONE, or a good $33, are missing to reach the threshold. An amount worth $53 therefore decides whether the most important scarcity mechanism of a project with a $2.88 billion market value starts up. That mismatch says more about how busy Shibarium is than any growth announcement.

The community developer Mazrael, cited by U.Today, names a second point: ShibTorch is currently marked as under maintenance anyway while work continues on the bridge and the rest of the infrastructure. Even a full 1,000 BONE would therefore not trigger a burn straight away.

The second brake sits on Ethereum

The threshold alone would be a matter of patience. The heavier point lies on the Ethereum side. A contract called RootChainManager manages the tokens coming back from Shibarium there. After the attack on the bridge in September 2025, that contract did not get back its approval for SHIB from the custody account. The SHIB route of the bridge has been paused ever since.

That leaves the final leg of the burn to fail. The SHIB would indeed gather on Shibarium, they simply cannot find the way to Ethereum, where the dead wallet sits. Whoever has parked SHIB on Shibarium is stuck for the same reason: the tokens are not lost, but they cannot be brought back at the moment. Checking that takes a few minutes: start a return route for SHIB in the bridge window and see whether the route is offered at all.

The attack of September 12, 2025 still has consequences today

The incident behind the paused route is more than a year old. According to the project's developer report, it began on September 12, 2025 at 18:44 UTC. The attacker borrowed around 4.6 million BONE via a flash loan, briefly gained enough voting weight in the network and obtained the signing keys of the validators, by one count ten of the twelve keys. With forged checkpoints he then approved withdrawals from the bridge.

The reports put the outflow at 224.57 ETH and 92.6 billion SHIB. At the prices of the time that came to between $2.3 million and $4.1 million depending on the source; the figures diverge and are deliberately left as a range here. The 92.6 billion SHIB would be worth just under $0.45 million at today's price. The team then froze deposits and withdrawals of collateral and moved the funds of the stake manager into a hardware wallet with multiple signatures.

A year later the network is running again, yet the approval for SHIB in the custody contract on Ethereum is still missing. A feature of bridges between two blockchains shows up here that holds beyond Shiba Inu: after an attack, operations can be restarted quickly, but the individual approvals for each token come back slowly and one at a time, because each carries a risk of its own. Whoever holds tokens on a second layer should know which return routes are open. For an overview of venues where SHIB can be bought and sold without the detour via Shibarium, see our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

20.4 million SHIB on a Saturday, and what the figure really says

The transaction of October 24 came from an address with the identifier 0x8172, which otherwise draws no attention. 20,408,894 SHIB amount to roughly $100 at Sunday evening's price and to 0.0000035 percent of the circulating supply of some 590 trillion tokens. Before it, the daily counter stood at zero.

The figure gets interesting in comparison with the pace so far. Our balance of October 22 recorded 673 million tokens burned in 30 days, an average of 22.4 million a day. Saturday's single transfer lands just below that at 20.4 million. What looked like a comeback for burning was the average of a single day, delivered by a single address. Since that balance it is not the pace that has changed but the source: a running protocol operation has turned into a series of individual donations.

For a sense of scale: 673 million tokens in 30 days are 0.000114 percent of the circulating supply. At that pace, one percent of the supply would take several hundred years, and a good Saturday changes nothing about that.

Where the price stands

SHIB stood at $0.00000489 on Sunday evening, around €0.0000042. Over 24 hours that is a gain of 0.2 percent, after the price had lost almost 4 percent on Saturday during a broad decline across the market. Trading turnover of around $33 million in 24 hours is thin for a token of this size.

The next justified level above is $0.00000495, the daily high, and below it $0.0000048, the daily low. Both levels come from the past 24 hours and say little about the coming week. More robust is the observation that the price has not reacted in either direction to this week's burn reports.

Without a protocol burn the scarcity argument stands alone

Many holders justify their position with the shrinking supply. That argument assumes the burning comes out of running operations and grows with use of the network. Precisely that connection is currently broken. What arrives in the counters are transfers from individual addresses to the dead wallet, and those depend on the mood and the balance of those addresses, not on how busy Shibarium is.

Three things are therefore established: the threshold of 1,000 BONE is out of reach at 371.37 BONE, the portal is under maintenance, and the return route to Ethereum has been closed since the September 2025 attack. As long as one of those blockages holds, every burn figure in the trackers is a donation statistic. To test the scarcity argument, look at where the transfers come from rather than at the daily total.

The burn figures are public

Two sources are enough. The tracker at shibburn.com gives the amount burned over the past 24 hours and the past seven days. If the figure differs between two trackers by a few trillion, that is normal, because the providers count different addresses as dead.

The second look tells you more: open the list of incoming transfers to the dead address in a block explorer and see how many different senders they come from. If the burns are spread across many senders with small amounts, the protocol is working. If a single large transfer stands there on one day, as on October 24, it was one individual. That difference matters more for an assessment than the total beneath it.

Holding period and tax: what applies to your SHIB in Germany

For tax, the stalled burn changes nothing; the rules stay the same. Whoever holds SHIB in their own possession for more than a year sells tax-free under the law as it stands in Germany, regardless of the size of the gain. Under a year, gains count as private disposals and stay tax-free only up to the exemption threshold, which falls away entirely once it is exceeded.

One point deserves particular attention with Shibarium: a transfer between two of your own wallets is not a sale and does not reset the clock. The route across a bridge, however, is technically often a swap into a wrapped token and back, and that operation is not assessed the same way everywhere for tax. Whoever has moved SHIB via Shibarium should keep the records of those operations. How the legislator is currently treating the holding period, we follow continuously on our page on the status of the holding period reform.

ShibTorch: the burn restarts only from 1,000 BONE

Three steps make sense now:

1. Clarify your balance on Shibarium. Check whether SHIB of yours sit on the second layer, and expect the return route to Ethereum to stay closed for now. Whoever wants the tokens within reach keeps them on Ethereum or at a trading venue. For long-term custody away from an exchange, our comparison of hardware wallets helps.
2. Document the holding period. Note the purchase date for every position and keep the records of bridge operations. Which tools track the periods and operations cleanly is shown in our comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers.
3. Keep an eye on the BONE balance. Once the portal approaches 1,000 BONE and the team reports the approval for SHIB in the custody contract on Ethereum, the protocol burn comes back. Until then, every burn headline is a report about individual senders.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Sources: U.Today on the state of ShibTorch and the project's developer report on the bridge attack.