Popular meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) and major U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase recently collided in a mysterious and intriguing series of transfers.
Thus, recent Arkham data showed Coinbase at the center of some major wallet activity involving 1,265,207,242,406 SHIB, which is about $12.7 million at current prices. The transactions with the Shiba Inu coin were made over two days and were done in several large blocks instead of one big transaction.
The breakdown is as follows for SHIB: 551.6 billion, 414.8 billion, 240.5 billion, 238.6 billion and 220.4 billion coins moved in succession, while Coinbase was listed as the counterparty on both the outflow and inflow sides of each transfer, which means the exchange kept control of the tokens the whole time.
Destination wallets showed no history and were used only once to receive SHIB before being drained.
Thus, while the desire to link these transfers to some enigmatic whale activity is real, these all probably suggest temporary routing addresses of the exchange itself rather than independent holders.
What's up with Shiba Inu (SHIB) price?
At $0.0000101 per SHIB, the flows are not big enough to change the global capitalization. But they are big enough to mess with the visibility of liquidity on Coinbase and skew the data on blockchain monitors, making it look like tokens are leaving the platform even when the same amount is coming back.
For Shiba Inu, which is trading around $0.0000101 after dropping to $0.0000090 in October, the transfers do not change supply or demand.
Nonetheless, they point out how much meme-coin liquidity is actually sitting inside centralized exchanges, and how internal restructuring can easily be mistaken for market-moving whale activity when tracked without context.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team