It seems extremely difficult for Shiba Inu to reach 1 cent, primarily because of its immense circulating supply of nearly 590 trillion tokens. At 1 cent per SHIB, the meme currency would command a market cap of $5.89 trillion, over five times the current market cap of all digital assets combined.

However, recent developments – like the recently launched Shibarium layer 2 solution – could drastically reduce the circulating supply and potentially help the Shiba Inu coin reach 1 cent in the long term.

In this article, we’ll be tackling the question of whether it’s possible for SHIB to hit a penny. Before we get started, however, let’s take a brief look at the story of the Shiba Inu project and its journey toward the top of the crypto markets.

Shiba Inu: The meme coin that went from nothing to billions of dollars

Shiba Inu was launched in August 2020 without much fanfare. The token was presented as an alternative to Dogecoin, and was sometimes referred to as “the Dogecoin killer”. In contrast to Dogecoin, which has its own blockchain, SHIB is issued on the Ethereum blockchain. This gives it a lot more potential use cases, as the token can easily be deployed in decentralized finance applications. 

The creator of Shiba Inu is known under the pseudonym Ryoshi. Another important figure in the Shiba Inu project is Shytoshi Kusama, who serves as the lead developer. 

SHIB was largely unknown for about half a year after it was created. Before 2021, its trading volume was extremely low, less than $1,000 on most days. Ironically, the catalyst that brought Shiba Inu to the limelight was Dogecoin, which Shiba Inu was meant to replace. Dogecoin’s massive price increase in the early part of 2021 led crypto speculators to look for “the next Dogecoin”, and the market settled on Shiba Inu as the best candidate.

It would be extremely difficult for Shiba Inu to reach 1 cent. Even during SHIB’s all-time high in October 2021, when the token was trading at $0.0000881, SHIB would have needed to increase in price by 113x to hit a price of $0.01. 

While SHIB has seen massive price increases in the past, the chance of hitting large multiples becomes smaller as the market cap of the asset grows. For example, it would not be so outlandish to say that a cryptocurrency with a market cap of $10 million could potentially increase 100x in price over a long enough time period. 

At its all-time high, SHIB had a market capitalization of $43 billion. At that kind of size, even a 2x price increase would have required a massive amount of capital to flow into SHIB. Achieving a 113x multiple from a $43 billion market cap asset would be next to impossible. 

For more context on why it’s so unlikely anything could boost SHIB to a penny, let’s take the example of Bitcoin. At its absolute peak, BTC had a market capitalization of $1.27 trillion. If SHIB were to reach $0.01, it would have a market capitalization of approximately $5.89 trillion, which would be 4.6x larger than Bitcoin at its very peak. 

At the time of writing, Apple is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of about $3.02 trillion. Microsoft is in second place with a market cap of $2.76 trillion. At a price of $0.01, SHIB would have a larger market capitalization than the two largest companies in the world combined.

Can SHIB reach 1 cent? Examining the “cheap coin” fallacy

So, if the market cap of Shiba Inu would be so outlandish if SHIB reached $1 or even $0.01, why do we see people repeating these price targets so often on social media platforms? The reason is what we like to call the “cheap coin” fallacy.

Most meme coins have a very large circulating supply, which results in a low price per unit. Sometimes, we refer to such cryptocurrencies as penny cryptos. This was already a feature of Dogecoin, which launched back in 2013, but the newer generation of meme coins like Shiba Inu has taken this concept to the extreme.

Dogecoin’s current supply is 142 billion coins, with about 5 billion new coins being added per year. Shiba Inu, on the other hand, has a supply of 589 trillion tokens. As a result, the price per token is extremely low—at the time of writing, 1 SHIB is only worth $0.00001.  At a surface level, this makes SHIB seem approachable and cheap to new investors in crypto. For example, some people that are looking to invest in crypto for the first time avoid Bitcoin because 1 BTC is “too expensive”, even though it’s possible to buy as small a fraction of Bitcoin as you’d like.

When there are viral social media campaigns urging people to buy Shiba Inu in order to “get SHIB to a penny” or “get SHIB to $1”, some people don’t stop to think about what that would actually entail because $0.01 and $1 seem like small numbers. Instead, they focus on the low dollar denomination and cheer for Shiba Inu’s 1 cent milestone. 

In reality, you shouldn’t be looking at a coin or token’s price per unit when trying to see if it is undervalued or overvalued. Instead, you should be considering the coin or token’s market capitalization, as that’s what will actually allow you to get an idea of how it compares to other crypto assets in terms of size. 

However, the fact remains that some people are drawn to coins that have a low price per unit due to the “cheap coin” fallacy. If you’re a speculator, you can sometimes leverage this to your advantage. 

Can SHIB still go up?

Even though we’ve hopefully demonstrated that you shouldn’t expect SHIB to ever reach 1 cent, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any potential upside for Shiba Inu. The token is trading 91% down from its all-time high price, so people buying SHIB at current price levels are truly “buying the dip”. 

The Shiba Inu project is quite well established, as it has a large base of token holders and listings on major cryptocurrency exchanges. So, if there is a cryptocurrency bull run again and demand for Shiba Inu rises, interested buyers will have no problems with acquiring the token. 

From the fundamental side of things, the Shiba Inu team is working on several products that are geared toward making SHIB  a more attractive token to hold. The most notable of these products is Shibarium, a layer 2 scaling platform for Ethereum that went live in August 2023.

According to Shiba Inu developers, Shibarium is focused on providing cheap and fast token transactions for metaverse and gaming use cases. Shibarium has also incorporated a burning mechanism in which SHIB tokens are burned with each transaction.

Buckle up #SHIBARMY ? Shibarium is officially live and ready to explore: https://t.co/56VsqOa2jt

— Shib (@Shibtoken) August 16, 2023

Other projects being worked on by the Shiba Inu team include the ShibaSwap decentralized exchange, the Shiboshis NFT collection, and SHIB: The Metaverse. 

If these products are widely adopted, they could serve as a catalyst for the price of SHIB to move higher and make it one of the best cryptos to buy. However, SHIB is still mostly perceived as a speculative meme coin, so it will likely take favorable conditions in the broader crypto market in order for SHIB to see substantial gains.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a coin will ever reach its previous all-time high again. This is especially true for Shiba Inu, which has only been around since the summer of 2020 and, therefore, doesn’t have a long price history that would help us understand how SHIB tends to behave across crypto market cycles.   

Shiba Inu price prediction: 1 cent seems to be out of the question in 2024

According to our algorithmically-generated Shiba Inu coin price prediction, the price of the meme currency will see a modest increase over the next couple of weeks, with SHIB’s price growing +10.1% to $0.00001033 by January 1st. 

After the short-term boost, the Shiba Inu coin’s price is expected to trade mostly sideways over the next 3 months and proceed to reach $0.00001100 by March 2024 (a +11% increase compared to its current price). 

On a yearly basis, the Shiba Inu coin is forecasted to change hands at $0.00001970 next year, about +98% above the current market rate. However, it is worth noting that the price prediction for Shiba Inu is based on the state of technical indicators in December 2023, which means that it could considerably change in the future.

So, can Shiba Inu reach 1 cent?

If you’re making a Shiba Inu price prediction, the 1-cent price level is more or less out of the question. As we’ve shown, such a price level would imply a completely unrealistic market capitalization of $5.89 trillion for Shiba Inu. Of course, Shiba Inu going to 1 dollar is an even more unrealistic scenario.

However, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for the SHIB price to grow. If the cryptocurrency market enters another bull run, SHIB could very well be one of the meme coins to explode. The Shiba Inu team is working on key products like Shibarium, and SHIB is positioned well thanks to numerous crypto exchange listings. 

If you are interested in longer-term price projections, check out our Shiba Inu price prediction for 2040 and 2050.