CoinMarketCap added that the change "was communicated in the same way supply updates for every other coin are done — directly on the website."
SHIBA INU's circulating supply of 549 trillion is correct, CoinMarketCap has said.
It comes after this figure was revised sharply upwards in late October from 394 trillion SHIB.
Although this led to the meme coin's market cap increasing by about $10 billion, it sparked fears that the increase in supply could dilute the value of the SHIB in circulation.
SHIB investors began to demand answers about the change on Twitter.
When asked why the circulating supply had been changed, CoinMarketCap said:
"We received feedback from some of our users that our circulating supply for SHIB was static and not updating dynamically, which prompted an internal audit. After a review, we refreshed the data on the backend and the figures are now updating dynamically. It bears mentioning that the audit has brought the circulating supply in line with figures from several other data sources."
CoinMarketCap added that the change "was communicated in the same way supply updates for every other coin are done — directly on the website."
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SHIBA INU has begun to lose some momentum in recent days — and at the time of writing, the cryptocurrency's value has fallen by 39% from the all-time highs of $0.00008845 set 11 days ago.
This has derailed the extraordinary bull run seen throughout October, with SHIB enjoying a trough-to-peak surge of 1,125% last month.
Some analysts have expressed concern that SHIB could suffer a similar fate to Dogecoin, which pulled back sharply after hitting highs of $0.73 back in May.
Whereas SHIB had managed to overtake DOGE in the rankings — briefly becoming the world's ninth-largest cryptocurrency — the market cap has now gone into reverse.
At the time of writing, SHIB is No. 11 with a market cap of $29.4 billion. By comparison, DOGE is No. 9 and has a total valuation of $38.6 billion.