Shiba Inu has been trading on Solana since October 4. Anyone searching a Solana app for the ticker SHIB since then gets several results. On Wednesday afternoon two different tokens carried th
Shiba Inu has been trading on Solana since October 4. Anyone searching a Solana app for the ticker SHIB since then gets several results. On Wednesday afternoon two different tokens carried that ticker and both were flagged as verified, and the one with by far the most holders was not Shiba Inu but a different memecoin. The short answer to the question of what counts now: the address decides which token you are dealing with, never the ticker, and the usual safety rule for Solana tokens points in the wrong direction in this case.
This piece explains what happened technically on October 4, what the canonical issue on Solana looks like, how you tell it apart from namesakes, and what applies legally and for tax when buying through a decentralised exchange in Germany.
On the afternoon of October 4, 2026 the bridge project Sunrise announced that SHIB had been listed on Solana; a few minutes later the official Shiba Inu account and the Solana account confirmed the report. Sunrise is a bridge built on Wormhole technology. A bridge is a program that makes a token from one blockchain available on another, without the token being issued twice independently of each other.
The announcement named nine venues, among them Jupiter, Raydium, Phantom, Kamino Swap and Mayan. In the first minutes after the start the market observer Solana Compass counted a good 3,000 trades from around 1,400 wallets and starting liquidity of about 514,000 dollars with roughly 1,500 holders. The circulating supply on Ethereum was untouched by this: no new SHIB were created.
For you as a holder, nothing changes for now. Your SHIB on Ethereum stay where they are. All that is new is a second trading route, and with it a second address you need to know if you want to use it.
A query of Jupiter's token interface for the term SHIB returned 20 hits on Wednesday. Two of them carry exactly the symbol SHIB, and both are flagged as verified in the list:
On top of that came a third hit with a lower-case symbol and 102 holders, as well as a series of tokens named "Shiba Inu" but running under the symbol SI. Several of them had one or two holders and around 3,500 dollars of deposited liquidity each, a pattern typical of freshly created imitations. 17 of the 20 hits were classified as unknown.
The holder count weighs more heavily here than the liquidity. Anyone who simply types "SHIB" into a wallet or on a decentralised exchange and takes the first known result lands with some probability on the memecoin with the 23,693 holders and not on Shiba Inu. Both are marked as verified, both look reputable in the list of hits. The flag says only that a token is known and not an obvious scam. On the question of whether it is the token you are looking for, the flag says nothing.
On Ethereum every token has a contract address. Shiba Inu runs there under 0x95ad61b0a150d79219dcf64e1e6cc01f0b64c4ce. On Solana the counterpart is called the mint address: an account on the blockchain that records how many units of a token exist and who may create them. The mint address is the only unambiguous identifier of a Solana token. The name and the ticker can be assigned by anyone, as often as they like, and that is exactly what has happened with the ticker SHIB.
The canonical issue of Shiba Inu on Solana carries the mint address shib5gSoVKPjwkXrxRk7SbQFzb2R9rQB3TgQWYX4RwW. The beginning of the character string is no accident but a so-called vanity address, that is, a deliberately computed address with a readable opening. That is convenient and at the same time a trap: an address beginning with the same four characters can equally be computed by anyone else. The opening alone proves nothing; only the complete string counts.
A simple test rule circulates about Solana tokens and appears in many guides: the mint authority and the freeze authority should both be set to null. The mint authority is the address allowed to create further units; the freeze authority is the address allowed to freeze someone else's balance. If both are null, nobody can mint more or block anything.
On the canonical SHIB issue on Solana the freeze authority is null, but the mint authority is not. That permission sits with a program belonging to the bridge. This is part of how it works: anyone bringing SHIB from Ethereum to Solana has the units locked on Ethereum, and the same amount is minted on Solana. On the way back it is burned on Solana and released again on Ethereum. Without an active mint authority the bridge could not do that.
The memecoin shibwifhat, by contrast, has a mint authority of null. Anyone applying only the rule of thumb therefore treats the bridged Shiba Inu of all things as suspicious and the other token as clean. With bridged tokens an active mint authority is the normal case. The real question is therefore who holds it.
As long as the die stands open, more can be struck. That is precisely what the bridge has to be able to do.
One difference appeared in no announcement and jumps out the moment you recalculate: Shiba Inu has 18 decimals on Ethereum, the Solana issue has four. Decimals set how many fractions a unit can be divided into, and they determine how a blockchain stores the raw figures.
In practice that means the same amount of SHIB sits in the data on the two chains as a completely different raw figure. Anyone transferring holdings from a block explorer or an interface into a spreadsheet by hand without carrying the decimals along miscalculates by fourteen orders of magnitude. For a tax return and for any holdings list of your own, that is the most likely source of error in the whole chain switch.
How much Shiba Inu actually sits on Solana? The mint address itself answers that. On Wednesday afternoon around 38.95 billion SHIB had been issued there. The entire circulating supply at the same time stood at a good 589 trillion SHIB.
That is 0.0066 percent, so roughly one in 15,100 SHIB. The market value of the Solana issue was around 210,000 dollars, measured against a market capitalisation of about 3.18 billion dollars for Shiba Inu as a whole. The new route is therefore a footnote in the holdings and not a shift in the market. Anyone reading the announcement as a price driver overestimates it considerably.
For the scarcity arithmetic the step changes nothing, because not a single SHIB is added or disappears. What sits on Solana is locked on Ethereum. How the burn balance has developed alongside it we recalculated on October 5 in our own analysis of the burned amounts.
The check takes two minutes and replaces every rule of thumb. The procedure works for any Solana token, not just this one:
Anyone not wanting to take that route has a simple alternative: buy SHIB through a provider authorised in the EU and do not switch chains at all. Which houses hold an authorisation is set out in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
Only measuring tells the two issues apart.
Ethereum addresses begin with 0x and consist of hexadecimal characters. Solana addresses are written in Base58, a string of digits and letters without the easily confused characters zero, capital O, capital I and lower-case l. The two formats cannot be converted into one another.
From that follows the most important rule when switching chains: SHIB from Ethereum never belongs at a Solana address, and vice versa. The switch runs exclusively through the bridge. A mistaken transfer between the chains is as a rule not recoverable, because nobody on the target chain holds the key to that address.
The European crypto regulation MiCA imposes obligations on crypto service providers, that is, companies offering trading, custody or exchange. Those companies need an authorisation, must segregate client funds and must maintain a complaints body. In a swap on a decentralised exchange there is no such company facing you. There is no authorisation, no supervision by BaFin, no complaint channel and no compensation if you end up with the wrong token.
That is how these venues are built. Anyone who knows it makes a deliberate decision; anyone who does not know it mistakes an unsupervised swap for a banking transaction.
A swap from one token into another is a private disposal transaction in Germany under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. The gain is taxable if less than a year lies between acquisition and disposal. Since 2024 an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposal transactions of a year taken together. Exemption threshold means: if it is exceeded, the entire amount is taxable and not only the part above it.
Important for the case at issue here: if you accidentally buy a namesake, the swap has taken place all the same. The disposal of the coin you put in counts for tax even if what you bought is worthless. Whether and how such a loss can be claimed depends on the individual case and belongs in the hands of a tax adviser.
So for every chain switch, record the signature of the Solana transaction and the hash of the Ethereum transaction, along with the date, amount and euro value. Which programs write that down automatically is shown in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers.
SHIB on Ethereum is an ERC-20 token, SHIB on Solana an SPL token. SPL stands for Solana Program Library and is the standard by which tokens on Solana are built. A wallet that knows only Ethereum does not display the Solana holding, and a pure Solana wallet does not know the Ethereum holding.
Anyone holding both needs either two applications or a wallet that supports both networks. With a hardware device there is the added point that a separate application has to be installed on the device for each network, and that each network has its own derivation path, that is, its own derivation of the addresses from the same recovery phrase. The phrase stays the same, the addresses are different. Which devices cover which networks is set out in the comparison of hardware wallets.
A look at the proportions within the project's own ecosystem helps with placing it. In the applications on Shibarium, Shiba Inu's own network layer, around 155,800 dollars were tied up on Wednesday according to data from DefiLlama. The starting liquidity of the Solana issue was above that at about 514,000 dollars, and the current holding, at around 145,000 dollars, is in the same order of magnitude.
Both figures move in the low six-figure range, while the market capitalisation of Shiba Inu is about 3.18 billion dollars. Trading still takes place overwhelmingly on Ethereum and on centralised exchanges. The Solana route is an option, not a relocation.
(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
