Shiba Inu is a hugely popular meme token, second only to Dogecoin. SHIB made a huge splash in 2021 when it skyrocketed in value and became one of the biggest cryptocurrencies on the market. When it comes to major cryptocurrencies, it’s especially interesting to follow the on-chain activity of the biggest whales, as it allows us to gain valuable insights into what might happen in the markets next.
SHIB is an ERC-20 token issued on Ethereum. Thanks to the transparency of the Ethereum blockchain, we can see exactly how many SHIB tokens are in the hands of the token’s biggest holders. In this article, we’ll show you the top 10 biggest Shiba Inu holders, and provide additional information about these addresses if it’s available.
The top 10 Shiba Inu holders in 2024
Without further ado, let’s check out the top 10 SHIB holders and learn a bit more about these Shiba Inu whales.
Data as of April 23, 2024.
If you want to see an up-to-date Shiba Inu holders chart, your best bet is to head over to Etherscan, the most popular Ethereum block explorer. Etherscan provides a helpful breakdown of the biggest Shiba Inu coin holders and provides a visual representation of the SHIB token distribution.
1. Burn address used by Vitalik Buterin
0xdEAD000000000000000042069420694206942069
Shortly after the Shiba Inu token was created, 50% of the total SHIB supply was sent to Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin. This was presented as a type of token burn, as Buterin is a highly respected member of the cryptocurrency community and it would be extremely unlikely that he would “dump” this huge amount of SHIB on the market.
Before we continue, we should clarify that Vitalik Buterin has no affiliation with the founders Shiba Inu and had no role in creating the project.
In 2021, Buterin decided to put his SHIB tokens to good use and donated around 10% of the SHIB in his wallet to charitable causes, including the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, as well as a PhD program dedicated to researching AI safety.
Buterin decided to burn the remainder of his SHIB holdings by sending the tokens to a burn address. A burn address (sometimes also referred to as a null address) is an address that nobody has the private keys to. Therefore, any tokens held on such an address are effectively removed from circulation permanently.
The burn address used by Vitalik Buterin is by far the largest “holder” of SHIB. Image source: Etherscan
2. Crypto.com wallet
0xf3B0073E3a7F747C7A38B36B805247B222C302A3
The third largest SHIB holder is a wallet that’s tagged as being owned by the Crypto.com cryptocurrency exchange. As a major exchange, it’s not too big of a surprise that Crypto.com’s userbase holds a significant amount of SHIB.
This wallet holds 37.5 trillion SHIB, which translates to roughly $1 billion at the time of writing this article. As an exchange wallet, it of course also holds large quantities of other tokens, including CRO, MATIC, USDT and many others. The total value of this wallet’s holdings is estimated at more than $813 million.
3. Binance wallet #8
0xF977814e90dA44bFA03b6295A0616a897441aceC
The third largest SHIB holder is a wallet owned by Binance, tagged as “Binance 8” on Etherscan. In addition to its substantial SHIB holdings of 35 trillion tokens, this wallet also holds over 503,000 ETH, which is worth close to $1.6 billion at the time of writing.
4. Robinhood cold wallet
0x40B38765696e3d5d8d9d834D8AaD4bB6e418E489
According to blockchain intelligence platform Arkham Intelligence, the 4th largest SHIB holder is a cold wallet containing funds that belong to the Robinhood trading platform. The wallet owns roughly $848 million worth of SHIB, as well as about $4.70 billion worth of ETH. The wallet also holds sizeable amounts of LINK and AVAX.
5. Upbit exchange wallet
0x02E2201576FBbeFb52812f2eE7F08eB4774B481e
Western cryptocurrency enthusiasts can sometimes forget that South Korea has extremely active crypto markets. The fifth-largest holder of SHIB is Upbit, which is the largest crypto exchange in South Korea. The wallet holds roughly $759 million worth of SHIB, and a very modest amount of ETH. There are also some other tokens in the wallet, but they were likely sent there as airdrops or spam transactions since the wallet’s holdings of these tokens are extremely small.
6. Binance wallet #28
0x5a52E96BAcdaBb82fd05763E25335261B270Efcb
The sixth-largest among Shiba Inu holders is a wallet owned by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. On Etherscan, this wallet is tagged as “Binance 28”.
This particular wallet doesn’t only hold SHIB, but also has $63 million worth of ETH, over $400 million worth of FDUSDT, as well as large quantities of other tokens such as PEPE, AGIX, DYDX and many more.
According to Binance’s proof-of-reserves page, the exchange holds a total of 67.6 trillion SHIB across its different wallets. In dollar terms, this translates to roughly $1.83 billion.
7. BitGo multisig wallet
0x422193843Fe209fAA94F5cc1780E04965E77Cb7F
The sixth-largest holder of SHIB is a multisig (or multi-signature) wallet managed by cryptocurrency custody firm BitGo, according to Arkham Intelligence. Unlike most of the wallets we have highlighted so far, this wallet’s only significant holding is SHIB. It holds 11.4 trillion SHIB, which translates to roughly $304 million.
A multisig wallet is a unique type of cryptocurrency wallet that requires multiple private keys for a transaction to be authorized. Standard cryptocurrency wallets, on the other hand, only require one private key to authorize a transaction.
Multisig wallets offer enhanced security and are commonly used to manage large amounts of cryptocurrency, or manage wallets such as DAO wallets where the funds are being managed by multiple people.
8. OKX wallet
0x6cC5F688a315f3dC28A7781717a9A798a59fDA7b
This wallet is owned by OKX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges on the market. It holds 9 trillion SHIB tokens, which are worth about $241 million at current prices. The wallet also holds large amounts of PEPE, UNI, BIGTIME, WLD and other ERC-20 tokens.
9. Binance-peg token wallet
0x47ac0Fb4F2D84898e4D9E7b4DaB3C24507a6D503
This is a wallet owned by the Binance exchange which is used to store tokens backing “Binance-peg” tokens. These are tokens on the BNB Chain blockchain platform which represent tokens that are not natively issued on BNB Chain. They are backed 1:1 with the underlying token. For example, Binance-peg SHIB tokens are issued on the BNB Chain, and are backed 1:1 with Ethereum-based SHIB tokens held by Binance.
This wallet holds roughly 8 trillion SHIB tokens, which corresponds to about $215 million at the time of writing this article.
10. Robinhood exchange wallet
0x73AF3bcf944a6559933396c1577B257e2054D935
Robinhood users seem to be big fans of SHIB, as this is the second wallet in the list of the top Shiba Inu holders that belongs to the exchange. The wallet holds 7.1 trillion SHIB, which translates to $190 million at current prices. The wallet also holds more than $200 million worth of ETH, as well as substantial amounts of other Ethereum-based tokens such as LINK and AVAX.
The bottom line
The vast majority of the top SHIB holders are cryptocurrency exchange wallets, as one would perhaps expect. However, there’s also some fascinating addresses just outside the top 10, such as 4 wallets that hold exactly 5 trillion SHIB each. The identity of the owner(s) of these wallets is unknown.
If you’re interested in more content about Shiba Inu, make sure to check out our article exploring whether it’s reasonable to expect SHIB to reach 1 cent.
FAQs
Who are the big Shiba Inu holders?
Most of the big Shiba Inu holders are cryptocurrency exchanges, which hold large amounts of SHIB tokens on behalf of their customers. However, there are also four wallets that each hold 10 trillion SHIB tokens. These wallets might be owned by the same anonymous SHIB whale.
How many Shiba Inu holders are there?
According to data sourced from the blockchain, there are more than 1.3 million wallets on the Ethereum blockchain that hold Shiba Inu. However, the real number of Shiba Inu holders is actually larger, as some holders have their entire SHIB balances on a cryptocurrency exchange.
