Shiba Inu Team Shares Vital Ecosystem Update as SHIB’s Price Plunges 15% YTD

Shiba Inu continues to attract new holders, but most investors have joined the ecosystem for more than a year.

Nonetheless, the meme coin’s price has slipped by double digits since the start of 2026, while stalled activity on Shibarium suggests the downtrend may not be over.

Significant Progress or?

Earlier today (March 25), the X account Shibarium | SHIB.IO issued an important update related to the entire Shiba Inu ecosystem. The team revealed that the total number of addresses holding the meme coin has reached 1,558,200.

Additionally, it reported steady monthly growth of over 8,500 new wallets, noted that 78% of all SHIB holders have hopped on the bandwagon more than a year ago, and that the amount of tokens sitting on exchanges has dropped below 81 trillion.

The last part is particularly important, as it suggests that investors continue to abandon centralized platforms in favor of self-custody, thereby reducing immediate selling pressure. Data from CryptoQuant, though, shows a slightly different story.

According to the analytics company, the figure plunged to a five-year low of around 80.1 trillion on March 9, but since then it has been heading north and currently hovers around 81.2 trillion.

SHIB Exchange Reserve, Source: CryptoQuant

The X account also reminded that approximately 410 trillion SHIB tokens have been burned, thus permanently removed from circulation. It is important to note that in 2021, Vitalik Buterin contributed a huge chunk of that figure, while recent burns have been far less impressive. In fact, Shibburn – an X account dedicated to showing the progress in that field – hasn’t provided any updates since late February.

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SHIB Stuggles

The ongoing bear market, the fading hype surrounding the meme coin sector, and other factors have caused Shiba Inu’s price to plummet by roughly 15% since the beginning of 2026.

As of this writing, it trades at approximately $0.000006174 (per CoinGecko’s data), while its market cap hovers around $3.6 billion. SHIB was once undisputedly the second-largest meme coin and even had ambitions to overthrow Dogecoin (DOGE) from the top spot. Nowadays, though, it has strong contenders such as Meme Core (M), whose capitalization has soared past $3.2 billion.

Meanwhile, further weakness from SHIB will not come as a surprise, considering the stalled activity on Shibarium. The layer-2 blockchain solution suffered an exploit last year, which severely damaged investor confidence as daily transactions (once in the millions) plummeted to mere hundreds afterward.

Shibarium is crucial for Shiba Inu’s ecosystem as it is designed to lower transaction fees, boost speed, and improve scalability. Some prominent industry participants, including the Bitcoin advocate Jeremie Davinci, have argued over the years that a potential SHIB rally would heavily depend on Shibarium’s advancement:

“I think Shiba Inu has a lot of utility now that they have Shibarium, and basically, it’s a chain that you can actually run all kinds of applications. However, nobody is using it, and there are no applications for using your tokens on Shibarium yet. If they get that solved, Shiba Inu will go to the moon.”

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