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Shiba Inu’s (SHIB) retail obsession with "zero-killing" has hit a wall in early 2026: a $3.65 billion market capitalization, as per CoinMarketCap, that remains disconnected from any tangible ecosystem utility for the meme-inspired cryptocurrency.
While SHIB enthusiasts continue to cherish the dream of decimal shifts, the massive multi-billion valuation of the Shiba Inu coin acts as a gravitational anchor, pinning the asset to a top-30 global ranking that it increasingly struggles to justify.
589 trillion token barrier for Shiba Inu (SHIB)
With a circulating supply of 589 trillion tokens, a move to even $0.01 would demand a $5.8 trillion market cap — roughly double the entire crypto market's historical peak.
For serious capital, the price per SHIB is a psychological distraction, and the real story is a tokenomics bottleneck where the sheer mass of existing supply prevents any meaningful price appreciation.
Market sentiment reflects this exhaustion as SHIB sits stagnant near $0.0000062 as of late February 2026, with the once much-hyped Shibarium failing to gain institutional traction or significant TVL. The network's burn mechanism remains a mathematical rounding error, removing a negligible 172 million tokens per cycle — a drop in an ocean of hundreds of trillions of Shiba Inu.
Some sophisticated allocators may try to price SHIB based on "cap-to-activity" ratios. However, without a massive supply contraction or a black-swan utility event, the "Dogecoin killer" is essentially a multi-billion dollar legacy meme.
In a mature 2026 market, SHIB is no longer a high-upside bet as it was even two years ago in March 2024. For now, it is a saturated large-cap fighting to prove its valuation is not a rudiment of 2021’s viral fever.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin