This is a harder question to answer for SHIB than for any other project assessed here, and the honest answer is short.

SHIB does not pay for transactions on any network. Ethereum's fees are paid in ETH, and Shibarium's are paid in BONE. It is not staked to secure anything. It does not entitle a holder to a share of any revenue. Its documented function is a vote in the ecosystem's governance, and beyond that it is a bearer asset: something to hold, and something to sell.

That is not a criticism dressed as a description. Bitcoin is also a bearer asset, and this framework has a specific test for whether being one is legitimate, which SHIB passes. What it means is that SHIB has no mechanism through which the activity happening around its brand reaches the token itself.

Every other assessment here opens its economics with a fee figure. This one cannot, because Shiba Inu has no record in the dataset this framework measures projects with. Both endpoints return an error on both possible names, and none of 466 tracked networks matches it. That was true when the data was gathered and it was confirmed again since, so it is a stable fact rather than a failed request.

The consequence runs through everything below. There is no fee figure for SHIB, no revenue figure, no measure of value held, no emissions schedule, and no record of what rights the token carries. Not low numbers, no numbers.

This is not evidence of anything bad. A token that does not process transactions has no transaction fees to measure, the same way a share certificate has no revenue of its own. But it does mean that the instruments this framework uses to find extraction, dishonesty and misaligned incentives had nothing to attach to.

Shibarium processes transactions. ShibaSwap holds user funds. Both are measurable, both have real figures attached, and neither of those figures is SHIB's.

The dataset records both under the identifier for BONE, a separate token in the same family. Shibarium's fees are paid in BONE and its value held is denominated in BONE. Reading those numbers as SHIB's would produce a fuller assessment of the wrong asset, which is why they were deliberately quarantined from this one.

For scale, and labelled as what it is: the value held on Shibarium is about $113,000. That is a BONE-denominated figure about a chain, sitting alongside a token whose market value is measured in billions.

The distinction matters more here than it sounds. Someone who owns SHIB does not own a claim on Shibarium's activity or ShibaSwap's fees. The brand is shared; the economics are not.

SHIB's supply can be read directly from its contract on Ethereum, which is a more reliable source than any summary of it.

One quadrillion SHIB were created at launch. The contract reports 999,982,329,055,168 in existence today, so about 17.7 billion have been permanently removed, a rounding error against the total.

The larger number is elsewhere. By most accounts half the original supply was sent to Vitalik Buterin, unsolicited, though that split rests on secondary reporting rather than a primary record. What is directly verifiable is what happened next: in May 2021 he destroyed most of it by sending it to an address nobody can spend from. That address now holds 410,436,745,389,206 SHIB, about 41% of everything that exists. Those tokens are gone permanently.

There is no maximum supply and none is needed, since the entire supply was created at once and none has been issued since. There is no vesting schedule, no unlock calendar, and no tranche waiting to arrive.

One figure to be careful with: the commonly quoted supply of roughly 589 trillion is not the contract's number. It is a figure already adjusted for burned tokens, so comparing it against one quadrillion double-counts the burn.

In September 2025, an attacker drained the bridge connecting Shibarium to Ethereum. The method was unusual and worth understanding: they borrowed 4.6 million BONE in a single transaction, which temporarily gave them voting power over ten of the twelve keys that approve the bridge's transfers, past the two-thirds threshold needed to authorise a withdrawal.

The final tally was about $4.1 million across seventeen different tokens, and $1.3 million of it was SHIB. Earlier reports of $2.4 million and $2.8 million were not errors; they were the initial drain and an early estimate before the full accounting.

Recovery was partial. The borrowed BONE was recovered, validator keys were rotated, and over a hundred contracts were moved to a stronger approval scheme requiring six of nine signatures. A bounty of about $225,000 was offered and refused. Most of the stolen funds remain with the attacker.

Reading this correctly requires holding two things at once. The defect was in Shibarium's bridge, not in SHIB's contract, and Shibarium is the separate BONE-denominated chain described above. But $1.3 million of what was taken was SHIB, held by people who owned SHIB. It is not a flaw in the token, and it was still a real loss to its holders.

In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly published guidance on how US securities law applies to crypto assets, and SHIB appears by name in it.

The relevant passage lists examples of digital commodities and includes Shiba Inu alongside Bitcoin, Ether, Cardano, Litecoin, Solana and XRP. Being classified this way means SHIB is not treated as a security, which removes a category of regulatory risk that has affected other projects.

Two precisions matter. SHIB appears in an illustrative list rather than as the subject of its own ruling, so the guidance reasons about categories rather than adjudicating this token specifically. And it is interpretive guidance rather than legislation; a bill that would put the same distinction into law has not passed.

It is worth noting plainly that this is favourable news. The material gathered for this assessment filed it under adverse coverage, which is backwards, and this page corrects that rather than repeating it.

This assessment tests projects against seventy-three questions. For Shiba Inu, fifty-four of them, 74%, could not be applied at all. That is the highest proportion of any project assessed here, by thirteen concepts, and the previous record holder was Zcash at 56%.

Three reasons compound. SHIB has no measured economics, which removes every question needing a fee, revenue or value-held figure. SHIB is a token rather than a network, which removes an entire block of questions about how value moves through a platform and its applications. And two pieces of material were never gathered, a development record and a whitepaper, both through collection failures rather than because they do not exist.

The most consequential block is the one built to be adversarial. Twelve of the thirteen questions designed to catch a project saying one thing and doing another could not be asked. Testing a claim against reality needs both a claim and a measurement, and this assessment had neither: no whitepaper stating what SHIB intends, and no fee data showing what it does.

That leads to the single most important sentence on this page. Shiba Inu emerged from this assessment without an adverse finding about its conduct, and that carries no weight whatsoever, because the tools that would produce such a finding never ran. It is not a clean bill of health. It is an untaken test.