In brief
- Shiba Inu is based off a meme, just like Dogecoin.
- It's set to begin trading on Coinbase Pro.
- After a delay in the listing, SHIB's price fell.
On Tuesday, Shiba Inu token was all set to show off its pedigree in front of Coinbase users. But after the exchange delayed an expected listing, SHIB is instead licking its wounds.
"We are experiencing technical issues that will temporarily delay the launch of SHIB on Coinbase Pro," the exchange wrote yesterday in an update to a June 15 announcement that it would list the meme token. "At this time we are disabling deposits of SHIB; withdrawals are still available."
The price of SHIB duly dropped 12% in 24 hours.
A similar technical delay affected the rollout of Solana on Coinbase Pro, as well. After being initially slated to start trading on May 24, SOL only just landed on the exchange within the last day, suggesting that SHIB may have to wait a while longer.
A Coinbase listing is known to give a cryptocurrency a boost. The "Coinbase effect," in fact, contributes to an average increase in price of 29% after five days, according to a March report from Messari. That may be because, like Robinhood, the popular exchange makes it easy for pajama-clad day traders with potentially little financial expertise to link their accounts to a debit card and click "buy."
Even a listing on Coinbase Pro, the exchange's "advanced trading" app, often comes with a bump, as it's typically a sign that a listing on the main app is just around the corner; crypto industry watchers buy up the token in anticipation of increased demand.
All of which explains SHIB's 26% boost in the span of three hours on Tuesday. It went from $.00000723 to $0.00000912. It's now back down to under $0.000008.
About those fractional numbers: Though an individual SHIB token price is well under a penny, the circulating supply of 500 trillion tokens brings its market cap to nearly $4 billion. SHIB is designed not to be scarce, like Bitcoin, but to be abundant. And like its non-sporting cousin, Dogecoin, it's taken the early-2010s Shiba Inu meme and turned it into a crypto community.
Decrypt has reached out to Shiba Inu and Coinbase for comment on when SHIB might emerge from the doghouse and play in the exchange's fenced-in yard.