Understanding Shib Burn: Sending SHIB to Official Shiba Inu Contract Leads to Permanent Loss

Shibburn clarified an irreversible loss of Shiba Inu tokens sent to the official contract address.

Shibburn, a prominent community-driven Shiba Inu burn tracker, recently took to Twitter to set the record straight about the burning process of the Shiba Inu token.

In its statement, Shibburn clarified that the tokens sent to the official SHIB contract are lost forever.

I only noticed one group claiming to send $SHIB directly to the contract address about a year ago, but there were a few cases where larger transactions, like one in early 2021 where 60 billion $SHIB was sent. I believe some of these token transfers might have been mistakes made…

— Shibburn (@shibburn) September 2, 2023

This clarification was issued because numerous novice investors mistakenly sent billions of Shiba Inu tokens to the official SHIB contract address, permanently removing these tokens from circulation. This irreversible outcome occurs once tokens are sent to this address.

Shibburn noted that only one project had taken responsibility for sending SHIB directly to the official Shiba Inu contract address approximately a year ago. Apart from this, Shibburn observed multiple unclaimed transactions in which the community transferred significant amounts of SHIB to the official SHIB contract address. For context, in 2021, a mysterious wallet sent 60 billion Shiba Inu tokens to the official contract address in a single transaction.

“I only noticed one group claiming to send SHIB directly to the contract address about a year ago, but there were a few cases where larger transactions, like one in early 2021 where 60 billion SHIB was sent.”

It’s worth mentioning here that Shiba Inu is a decentralized project created in August 2020 by the pseudonymous founder named Ryoshi. Ryoshi claimed to have locked 50 percent of the total supply in Uniswap and discarded the keys, making it impossible for anyone to withdraw liquidity, including the accumulated ETH in the liquidity pool. Therefore, any token sent to the Official SHIB contract would be lost forever as these coins are inaccessible.

The remaining 50% of the SHIB supply was gifted to Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. Afterward, Vitalik burned 40% of the SHIB supply by transferring it to the dead wallet. In addition, he has generously donated 10% of the supply to the Indian Covid Relief Fund, owned by Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal.