• Shiba Inu’s burn rate doubled over the weekend as the ecosystem celebrated a critical upgrade to Shibaroum that reduced bridging time to 45 minutes from seven days.
• This comes exactly three years since Vitalik Buterin burned 410 trillion SHIB, worth $6.7 billion, by sending them to a dead wallet, a historical event that kickstarted the memecoin.

Shiba Inu’s burn rate significantly spiked over the weekend following a critical upgrade to the Shibarium network, which the market expects will kickstart a bull market for SHIB.

As Shibburn revealed today, in the past 24 hours, the ecosystem has burned 4.796 million SHIB tokens, marking a 233% increase. In the past week, over 28.8 million tokens have been burned.

One wallet address, in particular, played the most significant role in the burns. It first sent over two million SHIB tokens to a dead wallet and followed it up by sending 2.91 million more tokens.

The burns come exactly three years since the famous Vitalik Buterin event when the Ethereum founder burned over 400 trillion Shiba Inu tokens that had been gifted to him by the community. The tokens were worth $6.7 billion at the time and accounted for half the supply of the memecoin. The burned tokens equalled 90% of the stash unwillingly gifted to Buterin; he later sold the remaining 10% and donated the funds to charity.

Buterin’s legacy is still being felt and celebrated in the Shiba Inu community. To commemorate the event, K9 Finance recently announced that it would burn KNINE tokens to honour Buterin’s burn, reduce the diluted market cap, make KNINE a deflationary token and increase the holders’ share percentage.

“3 years ago, Vitalik Buterin changed the game for SHIB, now it’s our turn!” the project wrote on X.

The increase in Shiba Inu’s burn rate comes after the developers announced an update on Shibarium that drastically cut down the bridging time. Now, it only takes 45 minutes to bridge tokens from Shibarium to Ethereum, a process that previously took upwards of seven days.

“So, what does this mean for you?   You can now manage your assets at lightning speed, adapt to real-time market changes, and seize new opportunities without the wait. Your financial strategies just got a turbo boost!” the network’s developers wrote on X.

They further described the update as a “game-changer” and a “commitment to progress, allowing you to engage more effectively in governance and drive collective action with newfound efficiency.”

The wins kept coming for Shiba Inu. As Crypto News Flash reported, Shibarium hit five million blocks, with over 400 million transactions and 1.8 million wallet addresses. With volume spikes and tales of SHIB millionaires, the memecoin is set to continue being one of the most important cryptos in the market.

SHIB trades at $0.00002502, shedding 1.45% in the past day as volume dipped 11%.