Shiba Inu (SHIB) rose 6.76% on Thursday, yet the meme coin trailed a market-wide rally that lifted Ethereum by 17.8%.
The project’s official account claimed credit for the bounce, telling followers that bears saw the token coming and chose cardio. Broader market flows suggest otherwise.
Why the Shiba Inu Price Move Tracked the Market, Not the Memes
The Shib team skipped any technical explanation. Instead, it’s post cast sellers as runners who abandoned the trade rather than defend it.
Almost every major asset moved the same way. Total crypto market value reached roughly $2.34 trillion on Thursday, about 9.32% above the previous day’s low.
Bitcoin (BTC) added 8.1% over 24 hours and trades at $69,515, while Ethereum (ETH) jumped 17.8% to $2,251.
The trigger sat far outside meme coin circles. Bitcoin reclaimed $70,000 on Wednesday after President Donald Trump floated a sizable government purchase, and $1.23 billion in short positions liquidated within an hour.
Smaller assets ran harder still. Solana (SOL) gained 10.2% and Pepe (PEPE) climbed 13.8%, which left Shiba Inu among the weaker names of the session.
Dogecoin (DOGE), the largest meme coin by market value, rose 6.8%. The two dog tokens therefore moved almost in lockstep, without any comparable posting campaign behind DOGE.
Hours later, the same account credited holders directly. Team members said the steady bullish posting had moved the market, then urged the community to keep going.
Correlation makes that claim hard to test. Shiba Inu has largely followed Bitcoin through 2026, so a market-wide bounce tends to lift it whatever the account posts.
Meanwhile, the playbook echoes late July. The team argued then that original crypto culture had never faded, and SHIB rallied close to 22% that week.
Bull Posting Meets Thinner On-Chain Data
However, one green day looks small next to the longer record. SHIB sits 61.2% lower than a year ago, and the token trades at $0.00000477.
Scale matters too. SHIB peaked at $0.00008616 in October 2021, which leaves Thursday’s level roughly 94% below the record.
Liquidity offers another check on the enthusiasm. Roughly $104 million changed hands over 24 hours, a modest figure for the 33rd-largest crypto asset.
Trader sentiment also stays split. In June, trader James Wynn dismissed Shiba Inu as old and dead while whales moved more than a trillion tokens onto exchanges.
Network data adds a further caveat. Shibarium activity fell sharply earlier this summer, and a six-month high in burns failed to shift the price at all.
Attention still matters for tokens with no revenue behind them. Yet it cuts both ways here, because the same flows that lifted SHIB lifted almost everything else harder.
Therefore, the session says more about broad risk appetite than about community sentiment. Shiba Inu price action has followed the wider market for most of this year.
The coming sessions should show whether Shiba Inu can lead rather than follow. BeInCrypto’s August price prediction flags $0.00000548 as the ceiling that rejected the token last month.