Shiba Inu has been trading on Solana since October 4. Anyone searching a Solana app for the
ticker SHIB since then gets several results. On Wednesday afternoon two different tokens carried
that ticker and both were flagged as verified, and the one with by far the most holders was not
Shiba Inu but a different memecoin. The short
answer to the question of what counts now: the address decides which token you are dealing with,
never the ticker, and the usual safety rule for Solana tokens points in the wrong direction in this
case.
This piece explains what happened technically on October 4, what the canonical issue on Solana
looks like, how you tell it apart from namesakes, and what applies legally and for tax when buying
through a decentralised exchange in Germany.
SHIB on Solana since October 4: Sunrise, Wormhole and nine trading venues
On the afternoon of October 4, 2026 the bridge project Sunrise announced that SHIB had been
listed on Solana; a few minutes later the official Shiba Inu account and the Solana account
confirmed the report. Sunrise is a bridge built on Wormhole technology. A bridge is a program that
makes a token from one blockchain available on another, without the token being issued twice
independently of each other.
The announcement named nine venues, among them Jupiter, Raydium, Phantom, Kamino Swap and Mayan.
In the first minutes after the start the market observer Solana Compass counted a good 3,000 trades
from around 1,400 wallets and starting liquidity of about 514,000 dollars with roughly 1,500
holders. The circulating supply on Ethereum was untouched by this: no new SHIB were created.
For you as a holder, nothing changes for now. Your SHIB on Ethereum stay where they are. All
that is new is a second trading route, and with it a second address you need to know if you want to
use it.
Two verified SHIB tickers on Solana: 23,693 holders on the wrong token
A query of Jupiter’s token interface for the term SHIB returned 20 hits on Wednesday. Two of
them carry exactly the symbol SHIB, and both are flagged as verified in the list:
- Shiba Inu, canonically bridged, address
shib5gSoVKPjwkXrxRk7SbQFzb2R9rQB3TgQWYX4RwW: 2,984 holders,
around 144,800 dollars of liquidity. - shibwifhat, address
F6qoefQq4iCBLoNZ34RjEqHjHkD8vtmoRSdw9Nd55J1k: 23,693 holders, around 59,500 dollars
of liquidity. An independent memecoin that uses the same ticker and has existed on Solana
considerably longer.
On top of that came a third hit with a lower-case symbol and 102 holders, as well as a series of
tokens named “Shiba Inu” but running under the symbol SI. Several of them had one or two holders and
around 3,500 dollars of deposited liquidity each, a pattern typical of freshly created imitations. 17
of the 20 hits were classified as unknown.
The holder count weighs more heavily here than the liquidity. Anyone who simply types “SHIB”
into a wallet or on a decentralised exchange and takes the first known result lands with some
probability on the memecoin with the 23,693 holders and not on Shiba Inu. Both are marked as
verified, both look reputable in the list of hits. The flag says only that a token is known and not
an obvious scam. On the question of whether it is the token you are looking for, the flag says
nothing.
The canonical mint address: what a mint on Solana even is
On Ethereum every token has a contract address. Shiba Inu runs there under
0x95ad61b0a150d79219dcf64e1e6cc01f0b64c4ce. On Solana the counterpart is called the mint address: an account on the blockchain
that records how many units of a token exist and who may create them. The mint address is the only
unambiguous identifier of a Solana token. The name and the ticker can be assigned by anyone, as
often as they like, and that is exactly what has happened with the ticker SHIB.
The canonical issue of Shiba Inu on Solana carries the mint address shib5gSoVKPjwkXrxRk7SbQFzb2R9rQB3TgQWYX4RwW. The
beginning of the character string is no accident but a so-called vanity address, that is, a
deliberately computed address with a readable opening. That is convenient and at the same time a
trap: an address beginning with the same four characters can equally be computed by anyone else. The
opening alone proves nothing; only the complete string counts.
Mint authority and freeze authority: the well-known rule of thumb misleads here
A simple test rule circulates about Solana tokens and appears in many guides: the mint authority
and the freeze authority should both be set to null. The mint authority is the address allowed to
create further units; the freeze authority is the address allowed to freeze someone else’s balance.
If both are null, nobody can mint more or block anything.
On the canonical SHIB issue on Solana the freeze authority is null, but the mint authority is
not. That permission sits with a program belonging to the bridge. This is part of how it works:
anyone bringing SHIB from Ethereum to Solana has the units locked on Ethereum, and the same amount
is minted on Solana. On the way back it is burned on Solana and released again on Ethereum. Without
an active mint authority the bridge could not do that.
The memecoin shibwifhat, by contrast, has a mint authority of null. Anyone applying only the rule
of thumb therefore treats the bridged Shiba Inu of all things as suspicious and the other token as
clean. With bridged tokens an active mint authority is the normal case. The real question is
therefore who holds it.
Four decimals on Solana, eighteen on Ethereum: a source of error when converting
One difference appeared in no announcement and jumps out the moment you recalculate: Shiba Inu
has 18 decimals on Ethereum, the Solana issue has four. Decimals set how many fractions a unit can
be divided into, and they determine how a blockchain stores the raw figures.
In practice that means the same amount of SHIB sits in the data on the two chains as a completely
different raw figure. Anyone transferring holdings from a block explorer or an interface into a
spreadsheet by hand without carrying the decimals along miscalculates by fourteen orders of
magnitude. For a tax return and for any holdings list of your own, that is the most likely source of
error in the whole chain switch.
38.95 billion out of 589 trillion SHIB: how small the Solana issue is
How much Shiba Inu actually sits on Solana? The mint address itself answers that. On Wednesday
afternoon around 38.95 billion SHIB had been issued there. The entire circulating supply at the same
time stood at a good 589 trillion SHIB.
That is 0.0066 percent, so roughly one in 15,100 SHIB. The market value of the Solana issue was
around 210,000 dollars, measured against a market capitalisation of about 3.18 billion dollars for
Shiba Inu as a whole. The new route is therefore a footnote in the holdings and not a shift in the
market. Anyone reading the announcement as a price driver overestimates it considerably.
For the scarcity arithmetic the step changes nothing, because not a single SHIB is added or
disappears. What sits on Solana is locked on Ethereum. How the burn balance has developed alongside
it we recalculated on October 5 in
our own analysis of the burned amounts.
Cross-checking the mint address: how to check which SHIB is genuine before you buy
The check takes two minutes and replaces every rule of thumb. The procedure works for any Solana
token, not just this one:
- Obtain the address, do not search for it. Get the mint address from a source
belonging to the project, for instance the project’s official channel, and match it against an
independent token registry. Jupiter publishes its verified addresses at
verified.jup.ag. Never take an address
from a direct message, a comment or an article, not even from this one. - Compare it in full. Check the complete character string, not just the beginning
and the end. Vanity addresses with the same opening are cheap to generate. - Search by address in the app. Paste the address into Phantom, Jupiter or another
application instead of typing the ticker. That rules out the mix-up, no matter how many tokens are
called SHIB. - Look at the mint’s data. The decimals, the issued amount and the two permissions
are in every Solana explorer. The official procedure is described in the
Solana documentation on token verification.
With a bridged token, expect an active mint authority and ask which program it belongs to. - Small amount first. The first time, send an amount whose loss would not hurt,
and check whether it arrives with the expected mint address.
Anyone not wanting to take that route has a simple alternative: buy SHIB through a provider
authorised in the EU and do not switch chains at all. Which houses hold an authorisation is set out
in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
Base58 against 0x: two address formats, one irreversible mistake
Ethereum addresses begin with 0x and consist of hexadecimal characters. Solana addresses are
written in Base58, a string of digits and letters without the easily confused characters zero,
capital O, capital I and lower-case l. The two formats cannot be converted into one another.
From that follows the most important rule when switching chains: SHIB from Ethereum never belongs
at a Solana address, and vice versa. The switch runs exclusively through the bridge. A mistaken
transfer between the chains is as a rule not recoverable, because nobody on the target chain holds
the key to that address.
Buying through a decentralised exchange: no supervised provider, no complaint channel
The European crypto regulation MiCA imposes obligations on crypto service providers, that is,
companies offering trading, custody or exchange. Those companies need an authorisation, must
segregate client funds and must maintain a complaints body. In a swap on a decentralised exchange
there is no such company facing you. There is no authorisation, no supervision by BaFin, no
complaint channel and no compensation if you end up with the wrong token.
That is how these venues are built. Anyone who knows it makes a deliberate decision; anyone who
does not know it mistakes an unsupervised swap for a banking transaction.
A swap on Solana and Section 23 EStG: the disposal stands, even on a mistaken purchase
A swap from one token into another is a private disposal transaction in Germany under Section 23
of the Income Tax Act. The gain is taxable if less than a year lies between acquisition and
disposal. Since 2024 an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposal
transactions of a year taken together. Exemption threshold means: if it is exceeded, the entire
amount is taxable and not only the part above it.
Important for the case at issue here: if you accidentally buy a namesake, the swap has taken
place all the same. The disposal of the coin you put in counts for tax even if what you bought is
worthless. Whether and how such a loss can be claimed depends on the individual case and belongs in
the hands of a tax adviser.
So for every chain switch, record the signature of the Solana transaction and the hash of the
Ethereum transaction, along with the date, amount and euro value. Which programs write that down
automatically is shown in our overview of
tax tools and portfolio trackers.
Custody on two chains: what a wallet has to manage for ERC-20 and SPL
SHIB on Ethereum is an ERC-20 token, SHIB on Solana an SPL token. SPL stands for Solana Program
Library and is the standard by which tokens on Solana are built. A wallet that knows only Ethereum
does not display the Solana holding, and a pure Solana wallet does not know the Ethereum holding.
Anyone holding both needs either two applications or a wallet that supports both networks. With a
hardware device there is the added point that a separate application has to be installed on the
device for each network, and that each network has its own derivation path, that is, its own
derivation of the addresses from the same recovery phrase. The phrase stays the same, the addresses
are different. Which devices cover which networks is set out in the
comparison of hardware wallets.
Shibarium alongside: 155,798 dollars tied up in applications
A look at the proportions within the project’s own ecosystem helps with placing it. In the
applications on Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s own network layer, around 155,800 dollars were tied up on
Wednesday according to data from DefiLlama. The starting liquidity of the Solana issue was above
that at about 514,000 dollars, and the current holding, at around 145,000 dollars, is in the same
order of magnitude.
Both figures move in the low six-figure range, while the market capitalisation of Shiba Inu is
about 3.18 billion dollars. Trading still takes place overwhelmingly on Ethereum and on centralised
exchanges. The Solana route is an option, not a relocation.
SHIB on Solana: The key points for your decision
- If you do nothing, nothing happens. Your SHIB on Ethereum are untouched by the
announcement. A chain switch is a voluntary decision, not a migration you would have to follow.
Anyone who only wants to buy more anyway stays with an authorised provider from the overview of
regulated crypto exchanges and saves themselves the question entirely. - If you trade on Solana, work with the address. Copy the mint address from a
project source, match it against a registry and search the app for the address instead of the
ticker. With the bridged issue, expect an active mint authority and check which program it belongs
to. For custody on both chains, the
comparison of hardware wallets helps with the question of which device carries both
networks. - Write down every swap. The signature, hash, date, amount and euro value belong
in your own records before you close the page. A swap remains a disposal transaction even when it
has gone wrong. Suitable programs are listed in the overview of
tax tools and portfolio trackers.
(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
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