Context: Shiba Inu is trading at $0.00000492 on Wednesday afternoon, 1.16 percent above where it stood 24 hours ago. The documented part: that puts the coin ahead of Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP an
Context: Shiba Inu is trading at $0.00000492 on Wednesday afternoon, 1.16 percent above where it stood 24 hours ago. The documented part: that puts the coin ahead of Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Cardano, all of which gave ground over the same period. Our own assessment follows further down, and it is more sober than the daily tally.
The session high was exactly $0.0000050 according to CoinGecko data, the session low $0.00000485. So the round level was touched and not held: the price turned lower there and slipped back. If you hold Shiba Inu, you face a day on which the direction is set not by your own coin but by the Federal Reserve's rate decision at 7 pm German time.
The market value of all SHIB tokens stands at $2.899 billion, trading volume over the past 24 hours at $61.46 million. Both figures as of October 28, 5:42 pm German time. The all-time high of $0.00008616 from October 2021 is 94.3 percent away, and nothing about that changed on Wednesday either.
More interesting than the distance to the record is the distance to the coin's own previous week. The average price over the past seven days is $0.00000491. Shiba Inu is therefore sitting practically on its weekly average, 0.2 percent above it. Measured over 30 days the average is $0.00000530, putting the current price 7.2 percent below it. The week is moving sideways, the month downwards.
On Monday evening this page reported that Shiba Inu, at $0.00000488, was trading lower than on any day in September. Since then 0.8 percent has been added. That sounds like very little, yet for the level picture it is the decisive difference: the 30-day low sits at $0.00000485 and was reached on October 26. Today's price is 1.5 percent above it, and today's session low tested it exactly.
Two days running, then, the price has accepted this zone and closed above it both times. That is not a trend reversal but a confirmation of the downside. The same applies to the upside in reverse: the price reached $0.0000050 once today and fell back again.
The daily comparison across nine large coins, all values from CoinGecko, as of 5:42 pm German time, change over 24 hours:
The two dog-themed coins sit at the top, the four largest names at the bottom. On the day before a rate decision that is not a given, because the usual order runs the other way: the smaller and more speculative a coin, the harder any nervousness in the broader market hits its price.
The mechanism behind it is no secret, but it is rarely spelled out. Since the US spot funds were approved, Bitcoin and Ethereum have been tied to capital that calculates against interest rates: fund managers and treasury desks shift money between government bonds, tech stocks and crypto, and they do so before a rate decision, not after. For Shiba Inu that capital does not exist. There is no spot fund on SHIB, no quarterly filing from a bank, no mandate that has to hold SHIB.
That produces a peculiarity which shows up on days like today: when institutional money flows out of Bitcoin, it does not flow into Shiba Inu but into dollars. Shiba Inu is then simply left where it is, because the buyers and sellers there are different people. A gain of 1.16 percent on a day when Bitcoin slips slightly is therefore less a strength of the coin than an absence of the selling pressure that moves the large caps.
Meme coins and large caps ran in opposite directions on Wednesday, and the cause lies in different groups of buyers.
The fear and greed index for the crypto market stands at 51 points on October 28, placing it in neutral territory. The previous day it was 48 points, also neutral. The market is therefore neither fearful nor greedy, and that fits the picture precisely: without a direction in the broader market, Shiba Inu is decided by its own order book, and that book is thin.
With Shiba Inu the spot market is only half the story. The other half sits in futures, and it is almost never read alongside articles on the SHIB price. A perpetual, or perp, is a futures contract with no expiry date: it runs on until somebody closes it. To keep its price from drifting away from spot, holders of the stronger side pay holders of the weaker side every eight hours. That balancing payment is called the funding rate.
At OKX the SHIB-USDT-SWAP contract traded at $0.000004911 on Wednesday at 4:49 pm UTC, while the same exchange's spot price was $0.000004913. The futures price was therefore 0.04 percent below spot. The funding rate stood at 0.01 percent per eight-hour period, with the next settlement on October 29 at midnight UTC. Open interest, meaning the sum of all open contracts on that exchange, came to $6.73 million.
Those three numbers together make a clear statement. 0.01 percent is the standard rate an exchange applies when neither side dominates. A futures price slightly below spot means leveraged buyers are not pressing. And $6.73 million of open interest is a small number against $61.46 million of daily spot turnover. Anyone buying SHIB today is buying against a futures market that has not positioned itself.
Spot and futures markets are not showing the same pressure on Shiba Inu, and the gap between them is measurable.
In practice that means two things. The built-up leveraged position that would turn a break above $0.0000050 into a fast run, because shorts have to be closed, is missing. But so is the opposite side that would turn a slide below $0.00000485 into a wave of liquidations. If you work with leverage, the cost side of such contracts is set out in our comparison of perp exchanges.
Four values make up the picture, and every one of them can be recalculated:
The span between the first and the third figure is 3.1 percent. Shiba Inu has been moving within that span since Sunday, and for a coin of this market value it is unusually narrow. Anyone wanting to place an order therefore has two reasoned prices instead of a gut feeling.
One metric explains the difference between the coins better than any percentage change: turnover, meaning daily volume divided by market value. For Shiba Inu that is $61.46 million against $2.899 billion, or 2.12 percent. For Bitcoin it is $22.66 billion against $1,616 billion, or 1.40 percent. For Dogecoin it is $508.2 million against $12.38 billion, and therefore 4.11 percent.
Shiba Inu is thus traded proportionally more often than Bitcoin and only half as often as Dogecoin. The higher turnover against Bitcoin does not mean more liquidity in absolute terms but shorter holding periods: the same money changes hands faster. For buyers, that means the price reacts more strongly to individual larger orders, upwards as well as downwards.
For investors in Germany, a price 94 percent below its high raises one concrete question, and it has nothing to do with the forecast. Under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, the sale of crypto assets is tax free after a holding period of one year. Anyone who bought SHIB before October 28, 2025 therefore sells tax free today, even if a gain has arisen.
The reverse also holds: anyone sitting on a loss within the one-year window can realise it through a sale and offset it against gains from other private disposals in the same calendar year. That includes gains from other coins, but not price gains on equities, which fall under a pot of their own. The offset refers to the calendar year, so the cut-off is December 31, 2026. Anyone who does nothing by then can only carry the loss forward.
One note on the legal position itself: the one-year rule is politically contested. We keep the current state of play on our page on the crypto holding period and its reform. If you do not have the holding periods of your purchases in your head, the right tools are set out in our comparison of tax software and portfolio trackers. For the offset you need the purchase date, purchase price and quantity for each position, not just the portfolio value.
With a price carrying five zeros after the decimal point, the entry price is decided not by the order fee but by the spread, meaning the gap between the best bid and the best ask. For Shiba Inu the smallest price increment sits around the eighth decimal place, and a spread of one such increment already amounts to 0.2 percent at $0.00000492. Two increments are 0.4 percent, and that is more than the order fee at most licensed venues.
Two points follow from this in practice. First: a limit order at a price you set yourself protects you from that span, while a market order accepts it. Second: euro trading in SHIB is thinner than dollar trading, so the spread in euros tends to be wider. Which venues licensed in Germany list SHIB, and at what fees, is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
Our assessment of today's tally is reserved, and the evidence for it is above. In its favour is that the price has closed above $0.00000485 two days running and that the futures market has built no one-sided position. Against it stands the clearer number: the 30-day average is 7.2 percent above today's price, the 30-day high 16.8 percent above it. A gain of 1.16 percent on a day when the large caps give ground changes nothing about that direction.
What decides matters is the rate decision in the evening, not the morning. If the broader market falls afterwards, Shiba Inu is likely to surrender its thin lead quickly, because it lacks the layer of buyers that supports Bitcoin. If the market rises, SHIB conversely lacks the leveraged position that would accelerate a breakout. This is an assessment of the situation and not a recommendation to buy or sell: with crypto assets, a total loss is possible.
Three moves make sense today, and none of them presupposes a view on the price:
(As of October 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
