On April 23, 2022, the developers of Shiba Inu token launched a new coin burning mechanism to let burners generate a passive revenue stream. The burning portal – ShibBurn – rewards users with a different token in return for burning SHIB coins. Within five days of its launch, 20 billion Shiba Inu were burnt on the portal by holders.
The meme coin got catapulted into the limelight when 176 million SHIB tokens were burnt at a Christmas party in December 2021, and 162 million more were burnt in February 2022.
Cryptocurrency is burnt by sending a part of the existing supply to a ‘burn address’ or ‘zero address,’ which is a ‘dead wallet,’ thus removing it from circulation. Crypto tokens sent to this address cannot be retrieved as the private key of these wallets is not available to anyone. By burning crypto tokens, developers create a deflationary system wherein the gradually decreasing supply fuels demand and trigger a price increase.
“The Shiba Inu Community or as commonly known and nicknamed ‘The Shib Army,’ has been quite vocal and providing ongoing feedback that would relate to creating a systematic method in which scarcity can increase while pushing the potential to grow the community’s wealth in their investment,” the official ShibBurn website reads.
ShibBurn is a collaborative project jointly developed by Shiba Inu creators and Ryoshi’s Vision (RYOSHI) creators. RYOSHI is an ERC-20 token which means the Ethereum blockchain powers it. Users who burn SHIB tokens will be rewarded with the “burntSHIB” tokens. All holders of the burntSHIB token become entitled to 0.49 percent of all transactions involving the RYOSHI token.
The ShibBurn portal has been created by deriving inspiration from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s humongous $6.7 billion SHIB token burn of mid-May 2021. It features three burn addresses, of which two are dead wallets, and one is a ‘black hole’ address. The first wallet is the same one used in Buterin’s burn, the second one is used for ShibaSwap listings (a DeFi project built on Ethereum), and the black hole address is the same wallet that was used to rename Shiboshi NFTs on the network.
According to the official blog, the ShibBurn portal continuously updates and relays real-time data. Burn transactions are stored by the developers on their server and can be viewed by anyone at any time on the official website. Etherscan can also be used to access the same data.
According to the Shiba Inu burn tracker Trackshiba, 410.34 billion SHIB tokens have been burnt out of the maximum supply of 1 quadrillion, leaving only 59 percent of the tokens in circulation. About 523.98 million tokens have been burnt in the last 24 hours alone. At the time of writing, the SHIB token is trading at $0.0000209, down 2.5 percent in the last 24 hours. Its market capitalisation stands at $11.47 billion.
Shiba Inu developers have also revealed that they are working on foraying into the Metaverse in the coming few days. The Shiba Inu metaverse will contain 1,00,595 virtual land plots that users will be able to purchase through a series of events. 36,431 plots of land built on parts of four different virtual districts will be made available shortly after launch.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
