Recent reports about Shiba Inu’s pseudonymous founder Ryoshi by the Shiba Inu community after tracking the founder’s wallet have sparked controversy within the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
Shibburn Claims Ryoshi Holds $1 Billion In Shiba Inu
According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by Shibburn, the Shiba Inu community-driven burn tracker, the burn tracker has claimed that Ryoshi holds a significant $1 billion worth of SHIB tokens amounting to over 10% of the token total supply. The claims basically contradict the previous belief about Ryoshi that he had no SHIB holdings.
The foundation of the tracker’s claims can be traced back to the historical data from Bubble Maps, a renowned on-chain analytical platform. In January 2023, it showed that a considerable amount of the SHIB supply was under the control of a group of wallets purportedly linked to Ryoshi.
In addition, the data asserts that these wallets already started to collect SHIB tokens as of August 2020. This was performed with the native wallet, identified as 0x1406, which for a small initial deposit of 38 ETH, or $10,000 at the time, accumulated an astounding 103 trillion SHIB tokens.
The wallet reportedly held over $5 billion in assets as Shiba Inu’s market capitalization surged to $40 billion two years ago. The assets in the wallet were later distributed into several smaller new wallets, which have remained dormant, with no activity since creation.
In its meticulous pursuit of preventing detection, Bubble Maps has since tracked the movement of these wallets and highlighted attempts to disperse cash into smaller ones. This has since caused quite a stir in the Shiba Inu community, giving rise to concerns about the project’s transparency.
Given that the aforementioned wallets have held the tokens without any sales, some cryptocurrency aficionados do not believe that this kind of disclosure is essential highlighting concerns that hackers may get interested in the wallets.
So far, Ryoshi has not responded to these claims. However, the project’s marketing specialist Lucie, recently took to her official X handle to express her displeasure about the claims, highlighting them as misinformation.
According to Lucie, those wallets were created prior to the 2021 bull market and they do not belong to Ryoshi.
Shibburn Address Community Frustrations
The post from Shibburn came as a response to heightened confusion among the media outlets, emerging investors, crypto exchanges, and the crypto community at large regarding the ownership and control of the Shiba Inu project.
According to Shibburn, there are no official tokens, and not a single entity controls the SHIB tokens, highlighting that it seems like an ongoing campaign to push the opposite.
“Please remember that no one controls $SHIB, therefore, it doesn’t have anything official or any tokens linked to it. It feels like there’s an ongoing campaign to push the opposite,” it stated.
The Shiba Inu tracker further asserts that they encountered resistance following the announcement made by the Shib Association, which raised bickering in the community. The team also stated that they were held accountable for not working in line with Ryoshi’s vision.