In August 2020, an anonymous developer using the pseudonym “Ryoshi” launched Shiba Inu — a token branded as “the Dogecoin killer.” It was created on Ethereum as an ERC-20, with a supply of one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) tokens. Half of that supply was sent to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet, with no warning and no instructions. The other half was locked in Uniswap.
Ryoshi’s reasoning was strategic: by giving Vitalik the power to dump the supply, SHIB became uniquely vulnerable to the most influential person in crypto. If Vitalik did nothing, SHIB would be safe. If he sold, it would crash. The launch was a gamble on Vitalik’s good faith. As it would turn out, that gamble paid off in ways no one could have predicted.
Leave a Reply