Shiba Inu was launched by a still-unidentified creator using the pseudonym Ryoshi in August 2020 on Ethereum, with just roughly $3,000 in initial liquidity on Uniswap. The project deliberately positioned itself as a “Dogecoin killer”/parody — no coincidence that it also chose the Shiba Inu dog breed as its symbol.
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There was no presale and no venture capital funding — Ryoshi symbolically sent 50% of the supply to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder.
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May 2021: Buterin donated most of the SHIB he received (worth roughly $1.2 billion at the time) to CryptoRelief, an Indian COVID relief fund, and burned a portion (roughly 410 trillion SHIB).
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The ecosystem consists of three tokens: SHIB (the main token), LEASH, and BONE (governance/gas token); its own decentralized exchange is ShibaSwap.
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May 2022: Ryoshi mysteriously vanishes from social media, deleting past Medium posts and Twitter history — since then, Shytoshi Kusama (also a pseudonym) has become the lead volunteer developer.
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August 16, 2023: Shibarium launches, Shiba Inu's own Layer 2 network on Ethereum, with roughly 5-second block times and validators required to stake BONE; governance runs through the Doggy DAO (tBONE holders).
To this day, the project has never received venture capital funding — it operates entirely on a community-driven, volunteer-developer basis, unusual for an asset of this market-cap scale.