Shiba Inu's Big Dream: Why $1 is a Fantasy

Shiba Inu (SHIB) has been on a wild ride, but its dream of reaching $1 per token is just that—a dream. In 2025, SHIB's value dropped by 60%, making it clear that hitting $1 or even $0. 01 is not realistic. The math behind this goal is simply not adding up. Let's talk numbers. There are 589 trillion SHIB tokens in circulation. To give you an idea of how many that is, Bitcoin has only 21 million tokens, and Ethereum has about 120 million. The difference is staggering. If SHIB were to reach $1, its market cap would be $589 trillion. That's more than 130 times the value of Nvidia, which is worth $4. 4 trillion. It's also 10 times more valuable than all 500 companies in the S&P 500 combined, which have a total market cap of $57 trillion. Even reaching $0. 01 would require a market cap of $5. 89 trillion, which is almost twice the size of all cryptocurrencies combined. Shiba Inu's team had big plans with Shibarium, a Layer-2 blockchain launched in August 2023. The idea was to create a deflationary engine by burning SHIB tokens through transaction fees. The plan was that as more users adopted Shibarium-based applications, transaction fees would be automatically converted to SHIB and burned. However, adoption didn't take off as expected. Shibarium once processed up to 4 million daily transactions but now handles only a few thousand. The Total Value Locked on the network struggles to stay above $1 million, which is very low compared to other Layer-2 options.Beyond Shibarium's struggles, other ecosystem projects have also failed to take off. The privacy Layer-3 blockchain announced in April 2024 has received minimal updates since launch. The metaverse project, after years of development, failed to fully launch. The gaming project, Shiba Eternity, attracted only a niche audience. The deflationary narrative of Shiba Inu took a big hit in 2025. Weekly burn activity dropped by 96. 96%, and as of late December, the ecosystem reported zero token burns in the past 24 hours. At the current pace, it would take 521, 415 years to eliminate enough tokens to justify a price of $1. Current monthly burn rates vary between 13 million and 2. 31 billion SHIB—a very slow pace that makes meaningful supply reduction a multi-century project. Unlike Bitcoin, which is seen as a store of value, or Ethereum, which is a computing platform, or XRP, which is used for payments, Shiba Inu lacks an organic source of demand. Only 1, 110 businesses worldwide accept SHIB as payment, according to crypto directory Cryptwerk. Its extreme volatility makes it a risky choice for payments, as any consumer or business holding tokens runs the risk of steep losses. SHIB hasn't made a new high in more than four years, showing it isn't a reliable store of value either.