The Shiba Inu (SHIB 1.11%) cryptocurrency could have turned an investment of just $1 into over $1 million between Jan. 1, 2021, and Oct. 28, 2021. That's right -- after opening at a price of $0.00000000008 per token that year, it soared by more than 100,000,000% to a record high of $0.000086 in just 10 months.
Unfortunately, Shiba Inu had lost more than 90% of its peak value by mid-2022. Speculative frenzies simply aren't sustainable, and the cryptocurrency failed to nail down a legitimate use case. Even after having a positive year in 2024, the token is still down 85% from its record high.
With that said, the cryptocurrency industry is benefiting from a series of tailwinds at the moment that could create significant value in 2025. Could Shiba Inu stage another historic rally and hit $1 this time around? The answer will leave your head spinning.
CRYPTO: SHIB
Key Data Points
A pro-crypto U.S. government is fueling risk-on sentiment
President Donald Trump campaigned on a series of pro-crypto policies in the lead-up to the election on Nov. 5 last year. They included the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin (BTC 1.60%) reserve within the U.S. government and lighter regulations across the board. Therefore, most cryptocurrencies experienced a surge in value when he won, sending the total value of all coins and tokens in circulation to a record high of $3.9 trillion.
Shortly after the election, Trump nominated Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Atkins is the co-chairman of a crypto advocacy organization called the Token Alliance, so he is a clear supporter of the industry. The Senate has yet to confirm him to the post, but Trump's interim appointment to the position of SEC chairman, Mark Uyeda, has already started pausing some of the agency's active legal cases against crypto companies like Binance.
With that said, Bitcoin is the only major cryptocurrency that has set a new record high since the election, despite tokens like XRP (XRP 7.07%) set to benefit significantly from a friendlier SEC. As it turns out, fundamentals matter above all else, and Bitcoin has amassed real support from the investment community because of its decentralized nature, its capped supply, and the availability of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
That happens to be where Shiba Inu falls over. It has struggled to generate adoption from investors, businesses, or consumers. Companies like Ark Investment Management or BlackRock are unlikely to create Shiba Inu ETFs because of its reputation as an extremely volatile meme token, and regulators would probably be hesitant to approve them.
Moreover, just 960 businesses around the world are willing to accept Shiba Inu as payment for goods and services, and many of them are obscure providers of internet and crypto services. If consumers can't spend a particular token at their favorite stores, they have no reason to own it. Thus Shiba Inu lacks organic demand.
Shiba Inu faces a big supply problem
The biggest hurdle preventing Shiba Inu from reaching $1 per token actually isn't adoption -- it's supply. There are 589.2 trillion tokens in circulation, so based on the current price of $0.000014 per token, Shiba Inu has a market capitalization of around $8 billion.
Using simple math, we can determine that a price of $1 per token would give Shiba Inu a market cap of $589.2 trillion, which is roughly 20 times the size of the annual output of the entire American economy ($29.7 trillion). It would also make Shiba Inu 163 times more valuable than Apple, which is the world's largest company with a market cap of $3.6 trillion.
As a result, there is no way Shiba Inu can reach $1 in its current state. But hope is not lost, because the community is trying to eliminate this hurdle by "burning" tokens, which means removing them from circulation forever. The easiest way to do this is by sending them to a dead wallet where they can never be retrieved and, theoretically, the price per Shiba Inu token should increase in proportion to the number of tokens burned.
Image source: Getty Images.
Here's how Shiba Inu could reach $1
There is one caveat to burning cryptocurrency: It doesn't actually create any value. Shiba Inu's market cap is currently $8 billion, so if the community burned 99.99998% of all tokens and left just 8 billion in circulation, the price per token would theoretically rise to $1. However, everybody's net financial position would be exactly the same as it was before.
Even though it won't generate any gains for investors, it might be Shiba Inu's only legitimate path to $1.
The community burned 293.6 million tokens last month, which translates to an annualized pace of around 3.5 billion tokens. In order to leave just 8 billion tokens in circulation, almost all of the current supply of 589.2 trillion tokens would have to be burned -- at the current pace, that would take a staggering 168,342 years. Therefore, a price of $1 is definitely out of the question in 2025, and it probably won't happen in this lifetime, either.
Unfortunately, the only way Shiba Inu will deliver real returns for investors is by finding a legitimate use case capable of creating actual value. Since that doesn't appear to be on the horizon right now -- even with a crypto-friendly U.S. government in power -- investors should be cautious about buying this speculative token.
