Shiba Inu, one of the most popular meme coins and No. 25 crypto by market cap, has been showing an impressive rally in the beginning of the year.
2025 wasn’t too kind to the SHIB community. Shiba Inu failed to return to its peak level. Even worse: SHIB price slipped into a long-term downtrend.
However, the beginning of 2026 marked a new hope. Despite Bitcoin struggling to regain momentum in the first days of 2026, meme coins have seen a massive spike in trading volume.
The character of the sell-off has shifted, and that change may matter more than price levels themselves.
Launched in August 2020 as the “Dogecoin killer,” Shiba Inu gained attention for its unconventional strategy of donating 50% of its supply to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
The token’s popularity surged during 2021, rivaling Dogecoin and even Ethereum’s trading volumes at its peak. However, the price subsequently fell over 90%, dropping below 8 millionths of a dollar in 2023.
Despite the setback, Shiba Inu has started October with a bullish setup that could push prices toward $0.00001410. If achieved, this move would align with historical price patterns, marking a potential 11%-40% rally.
Historically, SHIB has performed strongly in October:
The crypto rally that started in late 2024 has ended in disaster. The great $19 billion October wipe-out resulted in SHIB’s adding zero to its price. Shiba Inu couldn’t reach its ATH like most of cryptocurrencies did.
Recently, Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s Layer-2 blockchain, faced one of the largest attacks in its history. The attacker attempted to exploit the network by manipulating checkpoints, reportedly staking 4.6 million BONE tokens to gain leverage.
The exploit was triggered on September 12, when a hacker submitted fake data to Shibarium’s Ethereum-linked contracts, prompting an automatic system shutdown as a safety measure. Simultaneously, the attacker staked millions of dollars’ worth of BONE tokens to temporarily meet validator thresholds.
In total, the hacker drained about $4.1 million in ETH, SHIB, and 15 other tokens from the bridge before moving the stolen assets.
In response, Shibarium has announced the implementation of blacklisting mechanisms on its Plasma Bridge to prevent similar exploits. The team also plans to gradually restart paused bridges, prioritizing safety and user asset recovery.
Following the attack, SHIB’s price dropped 13% within 24 hours. Although the price recovered from the incident, the timing was unfortunate: the $19 billion October wipe-out has sent SHIB price downhill.
The Shiba Inu burn rate serves as a key ecosystem metric, reflecting the community’s optimism about the SHIB project.
By reducing the overall token supply, it aims to boost scarcity and maintain positive sentiment, potentially influencing SHIB’s price.
With transactions on Shibarium, SHIB is used to pay gas fees, and a portion is burned, contributing to this deflationary mechanism. While the strategy aligns with long-term value growth, significant price impacts would require larger-scale burns to create more dramatic effects.
Late 2025 and early 2026 marked a big surge in SHIB burn rate. This resulted in one of the biggest bull runs of the year so far.
For months, Shiba Inu has been in a steady decline, trading below all major moving averages with only limited relief rallies. However, the character of the sell-off has shifted, and that change may matter more than price levels themselves. The panic phase now appears close to exhaustion.
By mid-December, Shiba Inu whales largely halted aggressive selling. Since then, SHIB has compressed into a narrow range, forming a shallow ascending structure near the lows. This pattern typically signals seller fatigue rather than renewed bullish conviction.
The price has followed and it did not dissapoint.
On one hand, a big movement like that signals high volatility, typical for memecoins, and can’t validate a true long-term trend reveral. On the other hand, SHIB price might delete naught soon, which, on its own, will be a huge catalyst for trend reversal.
From a technical perspective, Shiba Inu appears to be forming a local bottom. The RSI has spent an extended period in neutral-to-oversold territory, a setup that often precedes either a relief bounce or prolonged consolidation.
The absence of clear lower lows points to signs of seller exhaustion, suggesting that pushing prices further down is becoming increasingly difficult for bears, although this alone does not confirm a trend reversal.
From a broader perspective, SHIB remains in a downtrend. The overall market structure has yet to recover, and the price continues to trade below all major moving averages. Even so, momentum appears increasingly stretched.
SHIB price will most likely remove zero near-term. There’s a possibility that Shiba Inu has bottomed out and the price levels will return to the November 2024 range of $0.000035-0.000049.
