Shiba Inu surges 36% as South Korean traders fuel mystery rally

Shiba Inu rose 36% to about $0.0000057 on Sunday, adding roughly a billion dollars to its market value in a day, with no announcement or development to account for it.

The token now carries a market cap near $3.4 billion on almost $380 million of daily volume, its highest turnover ranking in months.

Nothing has emerged from Shibarium, the network’s layer-2, and the wider dog-token complex has lagged. Dogecoin gained 6% over the same stretch, and smaller-cap tokens moved as much as 10%, which pointed to something specific to SHIB rather than a rotation into memecoins.

South Korean buying stands out. Upbit’s SHIB/KRW pair is the single largest market at about $62 million, over a tenth of global volume, and it prints a slight premium to Binance and the other dollar venues.

The country’s traders are known to drive exuberant rallies in high-volatility tokens, and the token’s climb fits that pattern, with a first push late Saturday, nine flat hours, then a second move through the Asian morning.

Short sellers paid for the jump, however. About $6 million in SHIB and 1000SHIB positions were liquidated across roughly 2,300 traders, some $5 million of that shorts, with the heaviest hour landing squarely on the second leg. Those liquidations followed the price up rather than causing it, and at that size they cannot explain a move this large.

Shiba Inu launched in August 2020 as an Ethereum token created by an anonymous developer known as Ryoshi, pitched openly as a “Dogecoin killer” with no product behind it.

The project has since built out Shibarium, a layer-2 network, and a broader token ecosystem, though SHIB remains far below its 2021 high and trades primarily on retail sentiment rather than anything the ecosystem produces.