Cover image via U.Today

The popular wallet tracker Shibburn recently updated one of its key metrics related to Shiba Inu. There has been a significant increase in the SHIB burn rate, accompanied by a large movement of meme coins out of the circulating supply.

This spike occurred after the SHIB team revealed plans for a major Shibarium upgrade set to take place in less than a week.

According to Shibburn, over the last 24 hours, the SHIB community has successfully burned 45,168,738 million Shiba Inu meme coins. This surge in burning led to an 88.32% increase in the overall daily SHIB burn rate.

The top three burns during this period involved transactions of 35,852,170, 6,261,928, and 1,000,000 SHIB being sent to unspendable blockchain addresses.

To date, the SHIB community has permanently burned 410,726,100,388,767 SHIB, while the total circulating supply stands at 582,881,498,855,693 SHIB. Additionally, 419 trillion meme coins have been locked in the SHIB burn wallet, holding the largest amount of SHIB, as reported by the Arkham Intelligence platform.

Image via Shibburn

Furthermore, 6,392,400,755,539 SHIB are currently locked in staking DeFi platforms and exchanges, temporarily reducing their circulation in the market.

Since January, the SHIB team has been exploring a new automated burn mechanism on Puppynet, the Shibarium testnet, marking a new era in SHIB burns. However, there have been no updates on this initiative since the initial announcement in January.

SHIB Developers Announce Upcoming Hard Fork

Earlier this week, the official Twitter/X account of the Shiba Inu token revealed that a hard fork of the Shibarium chain is scheduled for May 2. This significant upgrade aims to enhance the speed of new block production and bring predictability to transaction fees, ensuring equal treatment for all users.

The hard fork is expected to unlock new capabilities for Shibarium users, streamlining interactions with this Layer-2 blockchain. Additionally, the SHIB team recently secured $12 million to develop a Layer-3 blockchain on top of Shibarium, enhancing security and privacy for users and their transactions.