A total of nine businesses have committed to using part of their profits to burn tokens of the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) in a bid to reduce its circulating supply. The burns will be conducted by moving funds into the official SHIB burn wallet.

As CryptoGlobe reported, in early December only 59% of Shiba Inu’s initial supply was still in circulation, as a total of 410.29 trillion SHIB had been burned since the cryptocurrency was launched. Initially, Shiba Inu has a total supply of one quadrillion tokens, but 50% of them were locked in a smart contract to provide liquidity on decentralized exchange Uniswap, while another half were sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Buterin took a large amount of SHIB, at the time $1 billion in the cryptocurrency, and donated it to the COVID Crypto Relief Fund in India, along with significant amounts of other meme-inspired cryptoassets including Dogelon Mars.

The Ethereum co-founder then grabbed around 90% of the SHIB tokens that were donated to him and burned them in a transaction that removed over 410 trillion SHIB from circulation. Since Buterin’s transaction, the community has engaged in new token burning initiatives, including burning tokens based on views to a playlist.

These burning initiatives are now being supported by nine new businesses, which include Bigger Entertainment, a cryptocurrency-based record label that started its SHIB burn campaign in October of last year.

Bigger Entertainment’s founder and CEO Steven Cooper has commented on the Shiba Inu burns on social media, noting a total of 889 million SHIB has been burnt since the company’s campaign started.

The companies that pledged to burn SHIB tokens using a share of their profit also include the Shiba Coffee Company, which also claims to invest all of its profits in the meme-inspired cryptocurrency, cosmetics company Vibe Maquillage, motherhood e-commerce platform Marklien, dog accessories website Precious Paws, and the Shiba Search platform.

The token burns are set to reduce the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply, which if met with growing demand could lead to a price rise for the meme-inspired token. As CryptoGlobe reported, SHIB’s developers have been meanwhile working on a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that will empower SHIB token holders.

BitPay, a major cryptocurrency payment process for merchants, has late last year declared it supports the meme-inspired cryptocurrency, allowing users to “buy, store, swap and spend with this Ethereum ERC-20 token directly in the BitPay app.”

Other businesses accepting Shiba Inu payments include AMC Theaters and Nasdaq-listed online retailer Newegg. These larger retailers are likely to simply convert their SHIB tokens into fiat after receiving them, however.

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