Rakuten Wallet offers physical SHIB coins to test Japan’s retail demand

Rakuten Wallet will give away physical Shiba Inu (SHIB) coins at an investment seminar on November 3 in Osaka. Participants who show their SHIB holdings in the app will be able to take home the souvenir.

This gives the exchange with one more way to convert the excitement about the meme coin into customer engagement.

Show your SHIB balance, get a metal coin

Senior analyst Matsuda will be speaking at Rakuten Securities’ seminar in Osaka. During the event, attendees can receive a physical SHIB coin by visiting Rakuten Wallet’s booth and showing their SHIB balance in the app. The giveaway is open to seminar attendees while supplies last.

The collectible is neither airdrop nor blockchain token or any other type of payment instrument. Launched in July, it is Rakuten Wallet’s fifth release in the Real Coin series, which included such coins as Bitcoin, Ether and XRP before.

The new SHIB variant has been sandblasted, giving it a matte finish. According to the company, the feedback received internally was entirely good.

From an April listing to offline marketing

On April 15, 2026, Rakuten Wallet incorporated SHIB, XRP, Dogecoin, Stellar, and Toncoin into its trading portfolio, bringing the number to 14 tokens.

Rakuten’s retail ecosystem means the exchange can reach around 44 million customers, although this total does not reflect the active SHIB traders. Customers can convert Rakuten Points into SHIB, linking the token to the larger payments system of the company.

DigitalToday reported that Rakuten Pay can be used at about five million locations in Japan. The company also talked about having massive promotional giveaways to increase awareness of SHIB and encourage users to join its ecosystem.

A $228 billion retail market in play

The amount of Japanese crypto transactions from July 2025 to June 2026 was $228.3 billion, according to Chainalysis. This figure is less than that of South Korea, recorded at $449.1 billion. The share of decentralized exchanges in the crypto services market of Japan amounted to 34.5%, while 65.7% of the retail DEX swaps were between $10 and $1,000.

The general manager of Binance Japan, Arisa Toyosaki, described the problem as:

Japan has a large, active retail crypto base, but growth has been constrained by tax treatment and a relatively conservative investing culture.

— Arisa Toyosaki, quoted by Chainalysis

Previously, Cryptopolitan has reported the addition of SHIB to the Green List of Japan, getting the same regulatory treatment as Bitcoin and Ether. While this is important from the regulatory listing perspective, it does not mean that it endorses any investments.

Giveaways versus measurable demand

Japan’s cryptocurrency market is on the rise and could be beneficial for Rakuten. However, being able to reach potential customers does not mean that they would engage in trading.

This distinction can be observed in CoinGecko’s report for the third quarter of this year: the worldwide cryptocurrency market capitalization increased by 39.6%, while the spot trading volume on the top 10 centralized exchanges decreased by 14.2%. Thus, the increasing valuation did not cause any positive changes in trading.

Can promotional giveaways succeed in bridging the divide? Research conducted at the University of Arizona by Tianyang Xie, Yong Ge, and Karthik Kannan looked at a sample of 2,160 cryptocurrencies in order to understand the role of digital token giveaways in the profitability of crypto trading. They found that airdrops had a positive impact on returns and trading volumes.

Nonetheless, the way the giveaway was organized played a big role in determining its success. Issues related to privacy diminished both measures. On the contrary, a more equitable token giveaway was associated with higher returns, but trading volumes went down as a result. Social-media exposure also influenced outcomes.

Attracting traders is one thing. Getting them to stay is another. Bitquery analyzed 51 major airdrops in 2026 and found that, in the median case, 73% of recipients moved their tokens within a day. After 30 days, only 23% still held at least half their tokens, while the median token traded 48% below its first-week price.

These findings, along with the University of Arizona research, concern digital token giveaways rather than physical collectibles. Still, they raise a relevant question for Rakuten: will its SHIB promotion encourage people to keep trading, or simply attract attention for a day? The answer will depend on whether trading volume and liquidity improve beyond the event itself.