Shiba Inu has made an exciting announcement regarding the automation of its SHIB burns, starting this month. A community member has estimated that this new feature could potentially burn over 100 trillion SHIB tokens annually.
To break it down, this would equate to 9.25 trillion SHIB tokens burned each month. By the end of 2024, the community would have successfully burned 20% of its overall supply, which could potentially have a revolutionary impact on the token’s price.
In early December, Shiba Inu revealed its plan to automate token burns, putting an end to the manual burn process that relied on the official deployer wallet. The developers have assured the community that the automated burns will be more efficient and transparent, generating much excitement within the Shiba community. But how many tokens will actually be burned through this automated process? Well, according to one community member, the number could exceed 110 trillion tokens this year.
Since the beginning of the year, there have already been 26 burns recorded, as reported by an official tracker. Collectively, these burns have eliminated 62.5 million tokens, with an average of 9 million tokens being burned per event. Interestingly, this average is already 33.4% lower than the average number and size of burns observed in December, despite the commitment to make 2024 a year of massive burns.
In December, Shiba Inu successfully burned 34 billion SHIB tokens through 173 burn events, averaging over a billion tokens burned daily.
Despite the slower start, members within the Shiba ecosystem remain optimistic and have high expectations. One individual, known as “Web3Queenie,” predicts that Shubarium will burn 111 trillion tokens “in a bad year.” Her calculations are based on the assumption that the Shiba Inu ecosystem has a trading volume of only $5 billion, with burns remaining at 1% of the volume and the price remaining within the same range. Additionally, she anticipates that the burns on ShibaSwap 2.0 will reach a minimum of 44 trillion tokens annually.
The burns play a crucial role within the Shiba Inu community. With a circulating supply of 589 trillion tokens, Shiba Inu is among the cryptocurrencies with the highest circulating supplies in the market. Among the top 100 coins, only BitTorrent has a higher circulating supply at 968 trillion.
For comparison, Bitcoin has a capped supply of 21 million tokens, and it will still take at least another 100 years to mine all of them. Other cryptocurrencies like Monero and Aave have even lower supplies, with Maker holding the record among the top 100 coins, boasting a circulating supply of only 920,000 tokens.
In order for the price of SHIB to reach the coveted $0.01 level, the ecosystem must find a way to burn tokens quickly. At a price of $0.01 and with the current circulating supply, the total market cap would be just under $6 trillion, surpassing any other company or asset in the world, except for gold.
However, for the tokens to be burned, the Shiba Inu network, including its Shibarium L2 network, must increase usage and accumulate gas fees. Therefore, the success of Shiba Inu ultimately depends on its ability to dispel the perception that it is merely a meme coin with no utility.