What is documented: around 87.16 trillion Shiba Inu sat on the venues tracked by CryptoQuant on Wednesday morning, 0.08 percent more than 24 hours earlier. Our own assessment follows further
What is documented: around 87.16 trillion Shiba Inu sat on the venues tracked by CryptoQuant on Wednesday morning, 0.08 percent more than 24 hours earlier. Our own assessment follows further down: a balance held at an exchange is a readiness to sell, not a sale.
The price stood at $0.00000521 on Wednesday evening, 1.9 percent above the previous day, with a session high of $0.00000526 and a low of $0.00000509 (CoinGecko, as of October 21, 20:43 UTC). Market value is $3.07 billion, rank 36. What is interesting this Wednesday is not the price, though, but where the tokens sit.
The figure comes from CryptoQuant's exchange data, reported by U.Today on October 21 at 10:30 UTC. Three further values from the day belong with the 87.16 trillion SHIB balance: an inflow of 344.17 billion tokens, an outflow of 268.47 billion and a reported net inflow of 72.56 billion. The value of the entire exchange balance is given as $449.76 million, 4.12 percent more than the previous day.
Measured against the circulating supply of 589.24 trillion tokens, that is 14.79 percent. Put differently: not even one SHIB in seven sits at a trading venue, with the remaining roughly 502 trillion held in wallets, in contracts on Shibarium or in balances that have not moved for years.
The exchange reserve is the sum of all tokens in the wallets a data provider can attribute to an exchange. This value measures supply that could be sold within seconds, because it already sits where selling happens. The netflow is the difference between inflow and outflow over a period: positive when more tokens move onto exchanges, negative when more are withdrawn.
Both numbers are approximations. A provider only knows the addresses it has attributed to an exchange, and exchanges shuffle internally between hot and cold wallets. That is why the values from different services diverge, and why the series over weeks is worth more than a single day.
That series is available for October. On October 3 around 88.08 trillion SHIB sat on the tracked exchanges, the highest reading since early June, with a net inflow of more than 288 billion tokens in a single day. By October 17 the balance had fallen to about 87.06 trillion, with a negative netflow of roughly 33.94 billion tokens at the time. A second service put the same day at 87.09 trillion and minus 32.76 billion.
Between October 3 and October 21, then, a good 0.92 trillion SHIB disappeared from exchanges, a decline of 1.0 percent. The move of recent days points the other way: since October 17, around 0.10 trillion more tokens have returned to the venues. The drawdown of the first half of October has not reversed, but it is on pause.
Here is a calculation anyone can follow: 344.17 billion of inflow less 268.47 billion of outflow comes to 75.70 billion tokens. The reported figure, however, is 72.56 billion. The gap is 3.14 billion SHIB, about $16,200 at Wednesday's price.
That is not an arithmetic error but a pointer to how this data is built. Inflow, outflow and netflow are often formed over slightly offset time windows or over different exchange lists, and one service rounds at the level of billions of tokens. Anyone working with exchange balances should allow for deviations of this size rather than reading a single decimal place.
The stock stands ready, and it can only drain through one aisle: exchange balances say something about readiness to sell, nothing about the intent of individual holders.
The mechanism is simpler than the numbers suggest. Selling requires moving your tokens onto an exchange first. If the balance there rises over weeks, so does the supply that can reach the market with no further preparation. When that supply meets a thin order book, even a mid-sized sell order moves the price noticeably.
The reverse holds just as well. If the balance falls because holders move into self-custody, the short-term available supply shrinks. For a token with 589 trillion units in circulation, a trillion more or less on exchanges does not shift the position overnight, but it does change the direction in which a market tips on the same news.
Three levels below are well founded for the coming days. The round mark at $0.00000500 is the first stop and sits just 4.0 percent below Wednesday's price. Beneath it comes the October low at about $0.00000480, which the price has already tested this month. Should that low break too, $0.00000450 is the next level, where buyers stepped in repeatedly over the summer.
For context on the setup: the 50-day and 100-day moving averages currently lie between $0.00000525 and $0.00000535, the 200-day average at around $0.00000560. The price therefore sits just below its middle lines. The relative strength index stands at about 45, in neutral territory, neither overbought nor oversold.
On the upside, the first hurdle is therefore not an intraday level but a daily close above $0.00000535. Only that would put the price back above the middle averages rather than below them. The second hurdle is the 200-day average at around $0.00000560. In September SHIB still traded at about $0.00000620, a level 19 percent away.
Here is a comparison that puts the proportions straight and is rarely drawn in the running burn debate. On October 19 the burn rate rose 2,349 percent within 24 hours according to the count at Shibburn; in absolute terms, 1.10 million SHIB were destroyed. That amounted to a value of around $5.
The exchange balance is roughly 79 million times the size of that daily burn. Put another way: at 1.10 million tokens burned per day it would take more than 217,000 years, on paper, to destroy the amount sitting on exchanges today. Percentage jumps in the burn rate are therefore not a supply argument as long as the absolute number stays in the millions and the balance in the trillions.
On Tuesday we measured the gap between Shiba Inu and PEPE in this slot: $1.06 billion of market value separated the two, and the turnover ratio stood at 1.60 percent for SHIB. On Wednesday the gap is $1.11 billion, because SHIB comes to $3.07 billion and PEPE to $1.96 billion. SHIB's turnover ratio has fallen to 1.42 percent, while PEPE's stands at 17.79 percent on daily turnover of $349.10 million.
For the question in this article that means SHIB's order book has not deepened since Tuesday. A balance of 87.16 trillion tokens therefore faces a market that turned over $43.47 million in 24 hours on Wednesday. Even a fraction of the exchange balance could not be placed in a single day without moving the price.
The one-year clock runs from the day of acquisition, not from the day the tokens leave the exchange.
The practical point for investors in Germany sits in the other direction of the statistic. Moving your SHIB from the exchange into your own wallet reduces the exchange balance by exactly that amount and takes your counterparty risk off the table. For tax, that move is not a disposal: a transfer between wallets of the same person is neither a sale nor a swap, it triggers no tax and does not restart the one-year holding period under Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act. The day of acquisition remains decisive.
Two things still need documenting. First, the transaction ID together with the date, so that it can later be shown this was your own transfer and not a sale. Second, the acquisition data of the tokens you moved, because the exchange no longer reports that history for you after the withdrawal. How far lawmakers are touching the one-year rule we track continuously in the status of the crypto holding period.
The statistic only becomes concrete at your own portfolio. Three numbers are enough. First, the amount of SHIB sitting in exchange accounts, added up across every venue you use. Second, its share of your total SHIB holding: above 14.79 percent and you hold more on exchanges than the market average. Third, the purpose of each individual account. Tokens there for a planned sale or for an order at a particular level belong there. Tokens that have merely been stored for months have no business in someone else's account.
For the second part the route leads to a hardware wallet, for the first to an exchange whose fees and order-book depth match your own trading volume. Under the European MiCA regulation, authorised custodians must hold client assets separately from their own; a platform's authorisation can be looked up in the BaFin and ESMA registers before larger amounts are left there.
In this newsroom's view, Wednesday's increase of 0.08 percent is overrated when read as a sell signal. The arithmetic supports that: 0.08 percent of 87.16 trillion is around 70 billion tokens, a good $360,000, against daily turnover of $43.47 million. That is less than one percent of the day's business and sits within the noise. Against it stands the longer line, and that weighs more: the balance is still 0.1 trillion above the October 17 reading, and the direction of the drawdown from the first half of October has not continued.
What is demonstrable, then, is a readiness to trade, not an intent to sell. A robust signal would only emerge if the balance fell below 86 trillion, which several analysts name as the next threshold, or if it exceeded the October high of 88.08 trillion. Everything the data supports currently lies between those two values.
(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Crypto investments can lead to total loss.)
