For years, the story of LEASH was simple: 107,646 tokens. Fixed. Final. It was one of the core promises of the Shiba Inu ecosystem.
On August 11th, that story shattered. The total supply of LEASH suddenly increased. For investors who had trusted in the idea of scarcity, the change felt like a betrayal. Confusion quickly escalated into anger, and FUD spread across social channels, much of it directed at the current development team.
To move past the noise requires a careful look at the facts. This is the case file of LEASH: a tale of a vulnerability inherited from the past, the on-chain evidence of what really happened, and the collective choice the community now faces.
A rebase isn’t a hack in the traditional sense. It’s a function built into some early tokens that allows the total supply to change dynamically. Imagine a pizza: in a positive rebase, the entire pizza grows, and so does everyone’s slice — your percentage remains the same, but the size of your slice increases.
The anger from the community stems from one simple truth: LEASH was never supposed to be that kind of pizza. It was marketed as a fixed-supply token.
The real issue is not just technical — it is, in fact, about trust. For years, the community operated under the public claim of a prior developer that LEASH keys were “burned” and rebasing was “permanently disabled.”
But the on-chain evidence told a different story. As Shiba Inu lead developer Kaal Dhairya revealed in his investigation:
“The prior developer publicly claimed keys were ‘burned’ and that rebasing was ‘permanently disabled.’ In reality, the contract graph kept a hidden-in-plain-sight control path: pre-authorized orchestrators/proxies still able to trigger rebases under certain conditions (e.g., time windows, daily frequency gates, etc.).
From the outside: owner = 0x00 across contracts ⇒ looks decentralized. Functionally: rebase still callable by non-owner authorized callers ⇒ supply can change. We’re choosing careful language here: these are on-chain observations. They strongly suggest deliberate design to preserve de facto control while presenting a renounced/immutable surface.”
Even Ryoshi, the project’s founder, had tried and failed to negotiate with the original developer to disable the pathway. The problem has been lurking in the codebase since 2020.
It was only recently that an unknown actor exploited this flaw, triggering supply changes that shook the community.
The old contract cannot be fixed. That reality pushed the Shiba Inu team from investigation into action. Their plan: a professional, multi-pronged recovery effort centered on a LEASH v2 DAO proposal.
Key steps include:
This is not a passive response; it’s an active operation to restore confidence and secure LEASH’s future.
The evidence shows the exploit wasn’t born of negligence from today’s team, but of deception embedded in LEASH’s earliest code. The response has been transparent, urgent, and focused on empowering the community.
The fight for redemption now rests with the DAO. The FUD is misplaced; the decision is collective.
The hidden lever of control has been exposed. The choice is no longer to live with that vulnerability, but to build a future without it. What happens next will not be dictated by a shadowy developer from the past, but by the holders of LEASH themselves.
What remains is not fear, but choice.
