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- Grayscale has included the popular memecoin, SHIB, in the Consumer & Culture category in its Market Byte publication.
- The Consumer & Culture classification lends context but not stability; memecoins continue to experience sharp price swings.
Shiba Inu (SHIB), with a market cap of approximately $5.66 billion, has now been formally classified within the “Consumer & Culture” sector under the crypto-sector framework developed by Grayscale Investments in partnership with FTSE Russell.
According to Lucie, the SHIB marketing lead, this represents a notable endorsement from one of the leading digital-asset managers and a major index provider. She said, “The foundation is strong, the vision alive, and the future ahead REAL AS EVER.”
Inside Grayscale’s Crypto Sector Framework
For context, on October 24, 2023, Grayscale launched the “FTSE Grayscale Crypto Sector Index Series” in partnership with FTSE Russell. The idea was to give investors a structured way to categorize and measure the broad crypto-asset space.
As per the announcement: “investors have increasingly expressed interest in diversifying beyond crypto’s largest assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum”. The framework classifies crypto-assets into five, later six, sectors, each defined by use-case, functional role, and builds rules-based indices for each.
This included Currencies, Smart Contract Platforms, Financials, and Utilities & Services, each representing a different function within the crypto ecosystem.
Another one is the Consumer & Culture sector, which focuses on projects and networks that drive consumption-centered activities across digital goods and services. This includes areas like digital art, collectibles, NFTs, gaming, and social networks.
At the time of its introduction, the Consumer & Culture niche included tokens such as ImmutableX (IMX), Decentraland (MANA), and ApeCoin (APE), and SHIB is now part of it.
The Grayscale report also highlights the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Generic Listing Standards (GLS) for commodity-based trust shares, which include spot crypto assets.
As indicated in our earlier discussion, this means exchanges can list and trade crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) that meet those generic criteria without having to apply for individual SEC approval for each token via the usual rule change process.
Under the new rules, for a crypto asset to qualify as an ETP under the GLS, the underlying commodity must, among other things, trade on a market in the Intermarket Surveillance Group (ISG) or have a futures contract listed on a regulated exchange for at least 6 months.
In the Consumer & Culture sector, the only two assets mentioned as meeting the GLS criteria are Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu. From the Currencies sector, the assets reported to qualify are XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Stellar (XLM), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
The Shiba Inu team recently announced plans to shut down the legacy public Shibarium RPC endpoint, a gateway for wallets and decentralized apps to interact with the blockchain. Users are required to update their wallet settings to stay connected.
This is intended to enhance decentralization and network resilience, reducing the risk of single points of failure within the Shibarium ecosystem. Despite this, SHIB has struggled in recent weeks. The token is down 5.65% in the past 24 hours, 7.3% over the past week, 6.1% in two weeks, and 22.3% over the last month.
The initial SHIB supply has been reduced by a total of 410.75 trillion tokens through ongoing burns, leaving a current circulating supply of 589.25 trillion SHIB. Additionally, over 4 trillion SHIB are currently staked as xSHIB.
In the last 24 hours alone, the burn rate surged by 957.88%, with 11.3 million SHIB permanently removed from circulation —a continued effort to increase scarcity and long-term value.
