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Shiba Inu is having a rough stretch. The second-largest meme coin by market cap got left out of T. Rowe Price’s new crypto ETF, watched its burn rate crater, and saw its price slide to roughly $0.000004078 — down 17% over the past month and a brutal 95% off its all-time high from late 2021.
That’s a lot to absorb at once. T. Rowe Price launched the fund without SHIB as an underlying asset, which caught a chunk of the community off guard. Speculation had been running hot that SHIB would make the cut, so the exclusion stung. No official explanation came with it. Meme coins have always had a hard time convincing institutional fund managers that they belong alongside Bitcoin or Ethereum in a regulated product, and SHIB’s absence from the T. Rowe Price lineup is pretty much a textbook example of that problem playing out in real time. The fund is live. SHIB isn’t in it. That’s basically the whole story there.
Burn Rate and Shibarium Activity Both Drop
The on-chain picture isn’t great either. SHIB’s burn rate fell 54% over the past week — a drop that points to shrinking network participation. The burn mechanism matters because it’s supposed to reduce circulating supply over time, which theoretically supports price. When fewer tokens are being burned, the deflationary pressure eases. And right now, it’s clearly easing.
Shibarium isn’t doing much better. The layer-2 scaling solution was built to handle massive transaction volumes, and for a while it did. Now it’s processing just hundreds of transactions per day, down from what used to be millions. That’s not a small dip. It’s a collapse in daily usage, and it probably reflects fading interest from developers and regular users alike. Unclear whether there’s a specific catalyst behind the drop or whether it’s just the broader cool-off hitting the project harder than most.
Market cap slid below $2.5 billion. At one point, SHIB actually lost its spot as the second-biggest meme coin to something called MemeCore — though it clawed the ranking back after MemeCore took a sharp fall of its own. Still, even briefly losing that position to a lesser-known competitor is the kind of thing that gets noticed.
Rakuten Wallet Adds Physical SHIB Coin in Japan
Not everything is negative. Over in Japan, Rakuten Wallet — part of Rakuten Group — added a physical SHIB coin to its “Real Coin” series. It’s the fifth release in the collection and, per Shiba Inu’s official X account, the first to feature a premium blast finish. It’s a collector’s item, basically, not something that changes the token’s fundamentals. But it keeps the brand visible in a major market, and that’s not nothing.
The U.S. government also entered the picture. Arkham disclosed that federal authorities took control of $250,000 worth of Shiba Inu coins seized from FTX and Alameda Research. The plan is to use those assets toward repaying FTX creditors as the bankruptcy case grinds forward. It’s one more reminder that the FTX collapse still has a long tail, and SHIB happens to be caught up in it.
Wallet Count Jumps Despite Everything
Here’s the weird part. Despite all of it — the ETF snub, the burn rate drop, the Shibarium slump, the price decline — the SHIB wallet count just hit nearly 1.7 million. About 75,000 new holders came in during a single day. That’s a real number. It’s hard to square with the rest of the data, but there it is.
Maybe some buyers see a 95% drawdown from the all-time high as an entry point. Maybe it’s just curiosity. Either way, the community isn’t shrinking, even if activity on the network is. Resilient might be too strong a word, but it’s not collapsing in terms of raw holder count.
What’s still murky is whether any ETF inclusion is even being pursued formally, or whether that was purely speculative chatter. No launch date exists. No official comments have come from the project on that front. So the institutional recognition question stays open-ended for now.
The $250,000 in government-held SHIB, the 54% burn rate decline, and the 75,000 new wallets in a day — those three numbers probably tell you everything you need to know about where SHIB sits right now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why was Shiba Inu excluded from the T. Rowe Price crypto ETF?
T. Rowe Price launched its crypto ETF without SHIB as an underlying asset, but no official reason was given for the exclusion.
What happened to the Shiba Inu coins seized from FTX and Alameda Research?
Per Arkham, the U.S. government took control of $250,000 worth of SHIB seized from FTX and Alameda Research, with the assets intended to help repay FTX creditors.
