Shiba Inu jumped 36% on Sunday with no announcement behind it, adding roughly $1 billion in market value. South Korean venues are carrying the volume, other dog tokens have not matched the move, and short liquidations followed the price up rather than starting it.
Shiba Inu rose 36% to about $0.0000057 on Sunday, adding roughly $1 billion to its market value in a day, with no announcement or development to account for it. The token now carries a market cap near $3.4 billion on almost $380 million of daily volume, its highest turnover ranking in months.
South Korean venues carry the volume
Nothing has emerged from Shibarium, the network’s layer-2, and the wider dog-token complex has lagged. Dogecoin gained 6% over the same stretch, and smaller-cap tokens moved as much as 10%, which pointed to something specific to SHIB rather than a rotation into memecoins.
South Korean buying stands out. Upbit’s SHIB/KRW pair is the single largest market at about $62 million, over a tenth of global volume, and it prints a slight premium to Binance and the other dollar venues.
Traders in the country are known to drive exuberant rallies in high-volatility tokens, and the climb fits that pattern, with a first push late Saturday, nine flat hours, then a second move through the Asian morning.
Short sellers paid for the jump
About $6 million in SHIB and 1000SHIB positions were liquidated across roughly 2,300 traders, some $5 million of that shorts, with the heaviest hour landing squarely on the second leg. Those liquidations followed the price up rather than causing it, and at that size they cannot explain a move this large.
Meanwhile, Crypto Briefing reports SHIB had already posted a 25% surge around July 25, which suggests the 36% rally is part of a broader momentum wave rather than a single-day anomaly.
A token that trades on sentiment
Shiba Inu launched in August 2020 as an Ethereum token created by an anonymous developer known as Ryoshi, pitched openly as a Dogecoin killer with no product behind it. The project has since built out Shibarium and a broader token ecosystem, and Crypto Briefing puts the circulating supply at 585 trillion.
However, the backdrop for the category is weaker. Crypto Briefing reports memecoin market share relative to Bitcoin has declined throughout 2026, which suggests the broader investor base is rotating toward assets perceived as more fundamentally sound. SHIB itself remains far below its 2021 high and trades primarily on retail sentiment rather than anything the ecosystem produces.
Sources: CoinDesk, Crypto Briefing
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