Shiba Inu Price Drops as Whales Cash Out Amid Retail Frenzy

Shiba Inu's price surge over the weekend has come to an end, at least for now. The meme cryptocurrency dropped by 5.23% on Monday, trading at $0.000005025, following a sharp rebound that saw it climb from $0.00000416 to $0.000005312 and deliver a 27.5% gain.

The rally was fueled by a sudden influx of retail buying volume from South Korea, which led to an aggressive increase in token burns. According to Shibburn data, the daily burns jumped over 5,223% to permanently remove roughly 401 million SHIB tokens from circulation.

However, as Santiment's on-chain analysis reveals, this rally was not driven by long-term investors but rather by 'whale-to-retail' liquidity hand-offs. Big traders took advantage of the strong price action to cut their exposure, executing 52 high-value SHIB transactions in a single day.

The sharp volume surge is a clear sign that institutional and HINWs took advantage of the market momentum to cash out. Retail investors, who entered the rally late, found themselves trapped in losses while big traders made quick windfalls.