The Shiba Inu price recently posted an unexpected gain of over 13%, decisively breaking the long-term bear trend that stifled his momentum. Notably, 2026 is already shaping up to be a transformative year for the crypto market, with meme coins like Shiba Inu benefiting from the broader bullish shift and growing demand. Now with the Shiba Inu price testing higher rating zoneson-chain data has revealed the underlying forces behind the recent price increase
Key Drivers Behind the Shiba Inu Price Rally
Shiba Inu rose more than 13% on Sunday, January 4, just like the broader one 2026 meme coin madness started unexpectedly and continued to rotate capital between speculative assets. According to data from Santiment, a crypto analytics platform, SHIB’s sudden upward move was largely driven by aggressive accumulation of prime whales rather than a surge in retail demand.
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In a post on tightening their grip on the Shiba Inu supply amid muted retail distribution. This behavior signals growing confidence among the dominant whale portfolios and suggests that the recent price rise was not fueled by short-term, hype-driven buying.
Price data also shows that the Shiba Inu’s surge began in early January this year, after consolidating near recent lows for several weeks. Remarkably, the recent revival followed a long-term downward trend stretching from late October through December 2025, making the 13% price increase stand out as a clear shift in momentum.
Overlying the price action is a rising line on the Santiment chart that follows it the percentage of SHIB supply held by the top 10 whale portfolios. As prices fluctuated through the second half of 2025, this measure rose steadily, indicating consistent accumulation, even as broader market conditions remained weak.
At the time of the analysis, the 10 largest Shiba Inu portfolios collectively held approximately 62.65% of the total supply. Such a high level of concentration is unusual and rewarding large token holders significant impact on short-term price movements. The largest wallet alone held roughly 41% of the total SHIB supply, worth about $3.3 billion.
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Meanwhile, other large whale portfolios held between 2.8% and 5.7% each, with several individual addresses worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Strikingly, the timing of Shiba Inu’s 13% price increase corresponds to a visible one increase in whale concentration far right of the map. As more supply became tied up, available liquidity became thinner, allowing relatively modest buying pressure to push prices significantly higher.
Total Shiba Inu profits in 2026 so far
According to Santiment, Shiba Inu performance in 2026 now represents a gain of more than 32% Year-to-Date (YTD). If portfolio concentration remains high and the whales become richer, Volatility is likely to continue because prices respond quickly to changes in the behavior of large farmers. At the time of writing, Shiba Inu is trading at $0.00000916, reflecting an increase of around 5% in just one day.
Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com