Analysis: Shiba Inu Whale Has Not Moved 103 Trillion SHIB in 5 Years, $10,000 Investment Once Worth $5 Billion

According to Odaily, blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps has revealed that a mysterious whale address cluster within the Shiba Inu (SHIB) ecosystem has continued to hold around 103 trillion SHIB since 2020. The whale originally spent only 38 ETH (about $10,000 at the time) to build this position, which at its peak floated over $50 billion in value—making it one of the most astonishing investment cases in crypto market history.

According to Bubblemaps’ tracking, the whale initially bought 103 trillion SHIB through the wallet address 0x1406, representing about 10% of the circulating supply at the time. As SHIB’s price rose, the position’s value once reached around $5 billion. Currently, the address cluster still holds assets worth more than $2.5 billion, with a cumulative return rate of over 21,000 times.

To reduce exposure risk, the whale split the assets into 14 addresses in November 2021. In January 2023, Bubblemaps first disclosed this SHIB whale cluster, which at the time controlled about 10% of SHIB’s supply and was worth over $1 billion, sparking community discussion about the highly concentrated holdings of a single entity.

Subsequently, the address cluster has continued to migrate and split across addresses. In September 2023, Bubblemaps found that the holdings had spread from a few prominent wallets to many new addresses, a typical tactic for reducing on-chain visibility. With the help of the Magic Nodes tool, Bubblemaps was still able to identify the relationships between these wallets.

During the SHIB rally at the beginning of 2024, the value of the whale’s holdings once again exceeded $2 billion, and the number of wallets expanded to more than 170 addresses. As of now, the cluster still controls about 8.51% of SHIB’s circulating supply—a slight decrease from the initial 10%, but Bubblemaps notes this mostly results from normal on-chain transfers with no evidence of large-scale sell-offs.

Bubblemaps points out that this case demonstrates the significant value of on-chain transparency tools: even if an entity splits its wallets to hide massive holdings, every transfer leaves a public on-chain trail. The SHIB whale case has become a classic example for observing “whale behavior, position concentration, and on-chain tracking” in the crypto market.