Analysis: Shiba Inu’s mysterious whale has not moved 103 trillion SHIB for 5 years, turning a $10k investment into a peak value of $5 billion

ME News message, July 21 (UTC+8): blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps disclosed that a mysterious whale address cluster in the Shiba Inu (SHIB) ecosystem has continued to hold about 103 trillion SHIB since 2020. It initially built its position by spending just 38 ETH (about $10,000 at the time), and at one point its unrealized profit had exceeded a valuation level of $50 billion, becoming one of the most astonishing investment cases in the history of the crypto market.

According to Bubblemaps tracking, the whale first bought 103 trillion SHIB through wallet address 0x1406, accounting for about 10% of the circulating supply at the time. As the SHIB price rose, the value of this position at one point reached about $5 billion. Currently, the address cluster still holds assets worth more than $2.5 billion, with a cumulative return exceeding 21,000 times. To reduce exposure risk, the whale split its assets across 14 addresses in November 2021.

In January 2023, Bubblemaps first disclosed this SHIB whale cluster. At the time, it controlled about 10% of the SHIB supply, worth more than $1 billion, sparking community discussions about highly concentrated holdings by a single entity. Afterwards, the address cluster continued to migrate addresses and split positions. In September 2023, Bubblemaps found that its holdings had spread from a small number of clearly identifiable wallets to more new addresses, which was considered a typical move to reduce on-chain visibility. With the help of the Magic Nodes tool, Bubblemaps can still identify the relationships between these wallets.

During the early-2024 SHIB rally, the whale’s holdings value once again broke above $2 billion, and the number of wallets expanded to more than 170 addresses. As of now, the cluster still controls about 8.51% of the circulating SHIB supply—down from the original 10% share. However, Bubblemaps stated that this is mainly due to normal on-chain transfers and no large-scale selling has been found. Bubblemaps pointed out that this case demonstrates the important value of on-chain transparency tools: an entity can hide a massive holding by splitting it among multiple wallets, but every funds transfer leaves a publicly recorded trail on-chain. The SHIB whale case has also become a typical example for observing “whale behavior, concentration of holdings, and on-chain tracking” in the crypto market. (Source: ODAILY)