Shiba Inu plunges deeper into bear territory as buyers worry that big coin holders might be getting out

The social media–driven puppy crypto Shiba Inu has plunged more than 40% since its late October peak, with a drop of around 5% in volatile trading over the past 24 hours, pushing it even deeper into bear territory.

The coin was trading at $0.000050 Friday morning, down from its all-time high of $0.000088.

Shiba Inu began to drop after its peak on Oct. 27, when it overtook Dogecoin to become the ninth most valuable cryptocurrency token. After a 777% gain over the previous 30 days, the “Dogecoin killer” saw its market cap pass $51 billion—several billion more than that of Electronic Arts.

Shiba Inu’s precipitous climb—and current fall—has been largely attributed to the actions of just 10 “whale” wallets who hold almost 72% of the coin. The biggest wallet recently held a whopping 41% of the coin’s value—theoretically worth almost $21 billion at the peak. In this highly concentrated situation, the move of one major Shiba Inu whale to move $3 billion of the crypto into different accounts—possibly to sell them—spooked the markets.

“It looks like there were four transactions out of that account yesterday, each sending $695 million of SHIB to a different account—so a total of $2.78 billion,” said Tom Robinson, cofounder of Elliptic, which does blockchain forensics, told Bloomberg earlier this week.

Shiba Inu is not the first coin to trigger concerns over ownership concentration. Early on, the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum were heavily impacted by transactions made by whale wallets, but the coins have since broadened their ownership pool as more institutions and traders have bought them.

Shiba Inu, however, still struggles to break free from its “meme” asset class as it has been locked out of Robinhood because of what one analyst described as its “uncertain and volatile market conditions.”

Shiba Inu’s bull run has minted a new class of millionaire investors; despite the recent fall, its price is still 67,084,511% higher than it was a year ago.