Nobody Can Agree On The Shiba Inu Coin Circulating Supply, And It's A Huge Problem

While something as basic as the circulating supply of a cryptocurrency is one of the easiest things to find out, discrepancies between price-tracking websites are creating confusion for Shiba Inu Coin holders.

CoinMarketCap currently lists 549,095,509,738,353 SHIB in circulation - an increase of 155 trillion SHIB from its previous listing of 394,796,000,000,000 SHIB,. To add to the uncertainty, CoinGecko previously stated the supply of SHIB was 497,730,966,630,395 SHIB. It recently updated this to the same as CoinMarketCap.

The price-tracker fluctuations of nearly 40% led to confusion, fear, and a lot of misinformation for those in the ShibArmy. Here’s the damage report.

Shiba Inu Circulating Supply Chaos

To clear up what happened with the SHIB supply, we’ve broken the situation down into various claims.

Shiba Inu Coin Devs Are Minting New Tokens

For retail investors who only use one price-tracker, spotting a 40% increase to the supply of SHIB would no doubt cause panic. In theory, this could devalue your holdings by the same percentage.

As a result, some hodlers believed the Shiba Inu team was increasing the supply of SHIB. This may have even led hodlers to quickly cash out in fear of a huge dip.

This isn’t true. The CoinMarketCap change was a correction of a previously wrong circulating supply listing. The code for SHIB’s supply was locked in when Ryoshi first minted the 1 quadrillion SHIB at launch.

CoinMarketCap Wanted To Push The Price Of SHIB Down

Given the cryptocurrency community’s animosity towards memecoins like Shiba Inu, a conspiracy among hodlers began spreading about the price-tracker changes. Various claims surfaced online stating the circulating supply was increased to make SHIB worth less.

Again, these claims are questionable.

The circulating supply change didn’t alter SHIB’s price. If anything, it increased SHIB’s standing.  If the market cap remained at the $27bn amount prior to the update, then yes, SHIB’s price would have dropped to reflect this. However, CoinMarketCap’s increased the market cap by around $10bn, with SHIB’s price remaining the same.

The reason why only CoinGecko first reported SHIB overtook Dogecoin was because it had a higher circulating supply, which was reflected in the market cap. Such discrepancies will hopefully be resolved.

CoinMarketCap Has Made An Error

A quick look on social media will reveal a plethora of SHIB hodlers asking CoinMarketCap to revert back to its previous supply listing, as it was an error.

This is an understandable point, given the response from both the Shiba devs and CoinMarketCap.

The official Shiba Twitter account shared an alleged conversation with CoinMarketCap, where the price-tracker said this was an engineering bug.

This leads to the all-important question. Just what is the supply of SHIB?

Well, it does seem like the 549 trillion SHIB number is more accurate, but not entirely. The main sources that drop SHIB’s supply down from the initial 1 quadrillion supply come from the burn wallets. The first dead address holds 410 trillion SHIB burned by Vitalik Buterin in May. However, second burn wallet holds just 35 billion SHIB burned through the likes of Shiboshi NFTs and music playlists.

After this, it appears both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap denote the SHIB found in the India Covid Relief Fund wallet to be not in circulation. This is a more debatable aspect of SHIB’s supply, as the Relief Fund could still transfer this 40 trillion SHIB it holds - although it previously said it had finished transferring its SHIB.

Regardless of whether the SHIB supply is 549 trillion SHIB, or 590 trillion SHIB, it seems that CoinMarketCap’s initial estimate of 394 trillion SHIB was off. So why do hodlers want it restored?

It all comes back to the price, and misunderstanding the basics. There is a view that with 394 trillion SHIB, the price of SHIB would rise to $0.0001, because of the $38bn market cap. However, this $38bn market cap is only so high because of the additional 155 trillion added in the updated listing - not the price.

Read More: Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB) Has A Fake News Problem

[Image: Dan Dennis/Executium]