Shiba Inu saw its price leap by 36% to around $0.0000057 on Sunday, suddenly pumping about $1 billion into its market cap without any clear news or event sparking the rally. The meme coin’s total market valuation now hovers near $3.4 billion, supported by a burst in trading volume hitting nearly $380 million, marking its busiest day in months.
The standout feature behind this surge is concentrated activity on South Korea’s Upbit exchange, where the SHIB/KRW trading pair represents more than 10% of the global volume and trades at a modest premium compared to U.S. dollar markets like Binance. This intense buying appears to be a major factor, as the volume patterns align with the typical exuberant rallies driven by Korean retail traders, including a strong initial spike late Saturday followed by a steady climb through the Asian morning session.
Short Sellers and Trading Dynamics
Short positions in SHIB also suffered during the rally. Liquidations accounted for approximately $6 million, spread across about 2,300 traders, with $5 million of those related to shorts. these liquidations seem to have been a consequence rather than a cause of the price jump, unable to fully explain the scale of the move.
Unlike other dog-themed tokens, the broader memecoin sector did not follow suit: Dogecoin rose a modest 6%, and smaller tokens gained up to 10%, suggesting the surge was a SHIB-specific phenomenon rather than a sector-wide rotation.
Shiba Inu, launched in August 2020 by an anonymous developer known as Ryoshi, was designed to rival Dogecoin but started without any product backing. Since then, the project built the Shibarium layer-2 network and expanded its ecosystem, but SHIB still trades mainly on retail momentum, far from its all-time highs recorded in 2021.
For more on crypto market movements shaped by investor behavior, see also Ethereum and Bitcoin ETFs Face First Outflows After Weeks of Gains.
