Shiba Inu Token Burn Efforts Questioned by WallStreetBets Founder

Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of WallStreetBets, has raised doubts about the effectiveness of Shiba Inu’s ongoing token burn initiatives. In a recent post, Rogozinski noted that despite years of community-led efforts to reduce the token supply, the overall supply has barely decreased. He suggested that the current rate of burns is too low to have a significant impact on the market. Rogozinski also emphasized that the value of a token should come from its practical use rather than just reducing the supply. He stated, “You can burn tokens all day, but if there’s no purpose behind the coin, it won’t change much.”

Since its launch in 2020, Shiba Inu started with an original supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. Approximately 41% of this supply has been destroyed, with the majority of these burns occurring in a single transaction by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2021. Despite these efforts, the total circulating supply remains around 589.25 trillion tokens. This indicates that only a small fraction of SHIB has been removed since Buterin’s burn, and community-led burn events have made limited progress over the past four years.

The project lead for Shiba Inu, Shytoshi Kusama, has a different perspective. He believes that long-term value will come from the token’s use cases rather than from reducing the token count. Kusama has focused on building a broader ecosystem around SHIB, including products like ShibaSwap, Shibarium, and various digital experiences such as SHIB: The Metaverse and Shiba Eternity. He has stated that if people actually use SHIB, the focus on burning tokens will diminish.

Despite the shift towards adoption, the Shiba Inu team continues to support burn activities within its ecosystem. Shibarium, the network’s layer-2 solution, uses part of its transaction fees to buy and destroy SHIB tokens, removing over 50 billion tokens from circulation so far. Additionally, an automated tool called Shib Torch has been introduced to make the burn process more consistent. The team also promotes burn-focused community events, such as a recent card game competition expected to remove up to 10 billion SHIB per day based on user participation.

However, questions about the overall effectiveness of these burn efforts persist. Rogozinski commented, “At this rate, the supply might outlive the interest,” suggesting a need for a stronger focus on utility. The debate highlights the ongoing tension between those who believe in the value of reducing token supply and those who prioritize the development of real-world use cases for the token.