Meet Ryoshi, the Anonymous Creator Who Vanished After Launching SHIB

Ryoshi is the pseudonymous developer who launched Shiba Inu (SHIB) in August 2020 and then walked away. 

Pseudonymous means the person works under a made-up name, so nobody knows who Ryoshi really is. The founder last tweeted on May 29, 2021, and on May 30, 2022, deleted every tweet and Medium post tied to the project. 

More than four years later, SHIB is run by a team of community developers and still holds a market value of about $3.5 billion.

Who is Ryoshi And How Did SHIB Start?

Ryoshi built SHIB as a memecoin, a token inspired by internet jokes, with a few unusual design choices.

The Launch And The Original Plan

SHIB is an ERC-20 token, which means it follows Ethereum's standard rules for tokens and runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Ryoshi minted a total supply of one quadrillion tokens. The founder also created LEASH, a second token in the same ecosystem.

In a series of Medium posts, Ryoshi laid out a four-part roadmap that the team pledged in 2022 to complete:

• ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange, which went live in July 2021
• Shibarium, a layer-2 network built on top of Ethereum
• SHI, a planned stablecoin
• The Shibarium Financial Ecosystem, a wider set of finance tools

Why Half The Supply Went To Vitalik Buterin

Ryoshi sent 50% of all SHIB to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The other half was locked in a liquidity pool on Uniswap. Buterin had not asked for the tokens. In May 2021, he donated 50 trillion SHIB to the India Covid Relief Fund. Days later, he burned 410.24 trillion SHIB, worth about $6.74 billion at the time.

A token burn sends coins to a "dead" wallet address that nobody controls, so they can never be spent again. This single burn removed more than 40% of the supply and still shapes SHIB's tokenomics today.

Why Did Ryoshi Disappear?

Ryoshi never gave a reason. The founder had warned holders in an earlier blog post: "I am not important, and one day I will be gone without notice."

On May 30, 2022, the @RyoshiResearch account was wiped clean. The first blog post that introduced the coin, "All Hail the Shiba," was also removed. Some outlets, including Forkast, compared the exit to Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown creator of Bitcoin, who stepped away in 2010.

Shytoshi Kusama, then the project lead, responded with a Medium post the same day. He said he did not know Ryoshi's identity, praised Ryoshi as one of the most successful anonymous founders in crypto, and promised the team would finish the original roadmap. Kusama, now SHIB's lead ambassador, has gone quiet himself. His last post on X was on May 13, 2026, which marked 137 days of silence by late September.

What Has Changed In The SHIB Ecosystem Recently?

The biggest recent work has been on Shibarium, the layer-2 network Ryoshi first described.

Shibarium Fixes A Chain Reorg

A reorg, short for reorganization, happens when a blockchain replaces some recent blocks with a different set. On September 19, 2026, developer Kaal Dhairya confirmed through community member Mazrael that Shibarium's reorg problem was solved. Key details:

• The upgrade sprint began on September 12, 2026.
• On September 15, node operators received a full rotation of Bor static-nodes and Heimdall persistent_peers, the files nodes use to find each other.
• The RPC listing for Chain ID 109 was refreshed on Chainlist. BONE remains the gas token.
• The Shibariumscan explorer showed the chain 53% reindexed as of September 20.
• Provider dRPC still had to finish its move to the new setup, and validator staking remained under maintenance.

The team has not published a report on what caused the reorg. No disclosure has tied it to stolen funds or an exploit. Activity is also far lower than before: about 1,680 daily transactions, compared with 4.69 million in August 2025.

The Chainlink Integration

In December 2024, Shibarium adopted Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as its official tool for moving assets between blockchains. SHIB, BONE, and LEASH also adopted Chainlink's Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard, which lets them operate on 12 blockchains. 

Shibarium added Chainlink Data Streams for fast market price data. Chainlink Labs Chief Business Officer Johann Eid said the move would expand the ecosystem's capabilities.

In 2025, the team announced it would use CCIP to tie cross-chain burns back to Ethereum. Kaal Dhairya said builders could use the framework to bring SHIB to chains such as Base and Solana.

What Is The SHIB Price Today?

SHIB traded at $0.00000503 on October 1, 2026, according to Coinbase. That is up 12.46% over one month and down 54.37% over one year. CoinGecko data from September 30 put its market cap at $3.5 billion, ranking 36th. The price sits 93.3% below its all-time high of $0.00008616, set on October 27, 2021.

According to Shibburn, 410.84 trillion SHIB, or 41.08% of the original supply, has been burned. CoinGecko lists about 589.24 trillion tokens in circulation. The daily burn fell 91.31% on September 28, from 3,887,908 to 338,050 SHIB. Holder count reached 1,693,365 on September 27, after 8,927 new holders joined in September.

Conclusion

Ryoshi launched SHIB, wrote its roadmap, and disappeared. The project that remains has a working decentralized exchange, a layer-2 network that just fixed a reorg, and Chainlink CCIP support across 12 blockchains. Its burn tracker shows 41.08% of supply destroyed, and its price sits at $0.00000579. Shibarium's reindexing and the dRPC migration are still unfinished.

Resources

1. Report by CryptoSlate: Shiba Inu founder Ryoshi deletes posts, articles sparking FUD within the community
2. Report by Forkast: Shiba Inu creator disappears again
3. Report by Decrypt: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin burns $6.74 billion in Shiba Inu
4. Report by Benzinga: Vitalik Buterin burns 410 trillion Shiba Inu tokens
5. Report by Crypto.news: Shibarium reorg resolved as dRPC migration continues
6. Report by CoinGape: Shiba Inu fixes Shibarium reorg as RPC, Cloudflare and explorer upgrades roll out
7. Report by Bitget News: Shiba Inu's Chainlink integration unlocks cross-chain burns
8. Report by CryptoTicker: Shiba Inu forecast, 589 trillion tokens in supply
9. Report by CryptoTicker: Shibarium handles 1,680 transactions a day
10. Report by U.Today: 1,693,365 SHIB on-chain holders reached
11. Report by U.Today: Shiba Inu trendline break opens door to 26% move
12. Report by U.Today: 1 billion SHIB burned in 24 hours
13. Report by The Crypto Times: Is Pi Network destined to follow Shiba Inu's path?
14. Report by U.Today: Shytoshi Kusama marks 137 days of silence on X