Long traders bore the brunt of the damage when over $382,000 in Shiba Inu futures positions were liquidated in a single day, with $365,660 wiped from bullish bets and just $17,320 lost on the short side.
That wave of forced closures came as a long-dormant SHIB wallet suddenly came back to life after nearly 10 months of silence, drawing fresh attention to a token already under pressure.
A Wallet Empties Out
Data from Arkham Intelligence shows the wallet began its return with a test run — a small 10 million SHIB transfer through a MetaMask swap.
After that, the holder moved fast, pushing nearly 400 billion tokens through BitGo’s Forwarder Smart Contract across three separate transactions: nearly 112 billion first, then almost 190 billion, then a final 99 billion. When it was done, the wallet held just 110 SHIB.
The total amount transferred came to 399,989,999,938 SHIB. The address, which had sat untouched since roughly last August, was effectively cleared out in a matter of hours.
Reading The BitGo Move
What the transfers mean is harder to pin down. BitGo’s infrastructure is commonly used by institutional players for OTC deals or to move assets into cold storage — neither of which shows up as a sell on public exchanges. So while the scale of the move is hard to ignore, it does not confirm any tokens were sold into the market.
What is clear is that a holder sitting on a position worth tens of millions of dollars chose this particular week to act — a week when the broader crypto market was already sliding.
Shiba Inu Under Pressure
SHIB dropped 16% over the past week and lost the $0.000005 psychological support level in the process. At last check, the token was trading at $0.000004535, down another 3.50% in the prior 24 hours.
The decline has pushed the memecoin toward the edge of the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap, with SHIB sitting at 29th place and a market value of $2.65 billion.
The timing of the whale’s reactivation, arriving alongside a broader market selloff and a fresh round of liquidations, made the move impossible to ignore — even if its purpose remains unknown.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView