• Shiba Inu announced that it will start automating its SHIB burns this month, and according to one community member, this could result in the burning of over 100 trillion SHIB annually.
• This would amount to 9.25 trillion SHB monthly, and by the end of 2024, the community would have burned 20% of its overall supply, which could be revolutionary for its token price.

In early December, Shiba announced that starting this month, its token burns would be automated, ending the era of manual burns, which relied on the official deployer wallet. The developers promised the automated burns would be more efficient and transparent, stoking excitement in the Shiba community. But how many tokens will the automated burns eliminate? Well, according to one community member, it could be north of 110 trillion tokens this year.

Since the year started, there have been 26 burns, according to one official tracker, which, cumulatively, have taken out 62.5 million tokens, at an average of 9 million tokens burned. This number is already 33.4% lower than the average number and size of burns in December, despite pledges to make 2024 the year of massive burns.

In December, Shiba Inu burned 34 billion SHIB tokens in 173 burn events, with over a billion tokens burned daily.

Despite the slow start, community members in the Shiba ecosystem are full of expectations. According to one, Shubarium will burn 111 trillion “in a bad year.” In her calculations, “Web3Queenie” assumed that the Shiba Inu ecosystem only has $5 billion in trading volume, that the burn remains at 1% of volume and that the price remains in the same range.

She further predicted that the burns on ShibaSwap 2.0 will hit at least 44 trillion each year.

How Much SHIB Will the Shiba Inu Ecosystem Burn This Year?

The burns are critical for the Shiba Inu community. The crypto project has a circulating supply of 589 trillion tokens, among the highest in the market. In 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 even this will take at least another 100 years to mine. Others like Monero and Aave have an even lower supply, with Maker setting the record among the top 100 with a circulating supply of just 920,000.

If the price of SHIB is ever to hit the elusive $0.01 level, then the ecosystem has to find a way of burning the tokens, and fast. At a price of $0.01 and the current circulating supply, the total market cap would be just under $6 trillion, larger than 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, needs to ramp up usage and accumulate gas fees. As such, the success of Shiba Inu boils down to its ability to shake off the perception that it’s just a meme coin with no utility.