Shiba Inu has put its long-running SOU recovery framework into production, opening the claims of users affected by last year’s Shibarium bridge exploit and turning those claims into transferable, on-chain NFTs on Ethereum. The launch is important because it moves the project’s compensation effort from a promised structure to a live system with tangible balances, payment instruments, and a secondary market option for anyone looking for cash now.
The SOU concept itself is not new. In a year-end letter dated December 29, 2025, Shibarium developer Kaal Dhairya introduced “SOU: Shib Owes You” while stressing that “Not yet, beware of fraudsters,” describing it as a system where “every affected user has SOU NFT – an on-chain, verifiable record of the ecosystem.”
Shiba Inu ‘Shib Owes You’ Goes Live
That warning has now been replaced by an announcement that will be broadcast live. With X, Shiba Inu’s official account wrote:
“SOU is live. Introducing SOU (Shib Owes You) an onchain NFT built in an honest effort to support engaged users with periodic payments, donations, and rewards. Transparent. Tradable. On-chain. You can transfer, split, merge, or trade it on markets. Claim your SOUs:
In Shib’s writings, the system is framed as an attempt to make the recovery book public, readable, and mechanically enforceable rather than tracked in a secret database. “SOU (Shib Owes You) is more than just a name; it’s a commitment,” the documents said. “It represents the Shib ecosystem’s commitment to making users perfect with a transparent, tested, and on-chain recovery system. Activity Notifications: The system provides a real-time activity feed, notifying the community whenever a new offer is accepted or issued, payment is a perfect distribution method.
The mechanism relies on two balances: “Original Principal,” an immutable historical record of what a user has lost, and “Current Principal,” which declines as payments are demanded or donations come in. The documents also make a difficult distinction between debt repayment and benefits. “Payment” reduces principal as compensation, while “Reward” is an addition and “No Change” to the balance owed, placing rewards as bonuses in addition to payment rather than replacement.
The SOU is also designed to be a financial instrument, not just a receipt. Claims can be pooled or split to manage positions, transferred between wallets, or sold on the market, enabling a market for discounted claims for users who don’t want to wait for a flow of acquisitions.
Shib’s documents also describe a funding model that directs the income of the ecosystem and public contributions to one place, and the contributions are used equally for all the affected claims, and the voluntary costs of the creators in the second sale directed back to the fees or rewards.
It is behind the Shibarium bridge incident of September 2025, in which Shib’s security update stated that “unauthorized verification signature capabilities” were used to push malicious withdrawals through the PoS bridge, allowing for the withdrawal of many assets.
At press time, Shiba Inu traded at $0.00000656.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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