Japan’s E-Commerce Giant Rakuten to Give Away Physical Shiba Inu (SHIB) Coins to 44 Million Users

Japanese crypto exchange Rakuten Wallet will launch the production of tangible Shiba Inu (SHIB) souvenir coins, and metal replicas of the meme coin will join the company’s branded “Real Coin” lineup, which already includes physical versions of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. 

The company plans to distribute this merchandise for free at offline events and exhibition booths, using hands-on interaction as the main marketing tool to attract 44 million users of its ecosystem.

The release of physical souvenirs continues the marketing campaign in which the brand is using popular meme tokens. Earlier, Rakuten Wallet launched the interactive “Photo Contest 2026” on X, giving away digital SHIB and DOGE for dog photos. Now the company is partially moving this activity offline — the metal coins are expected to make cryptocurrency easier to understand for a more conservative retail audience in Japan. 

To retain these users, Rakuten has also integrated SHIB into its Rakuten Pay payment system, making the digital asset available for payments at 5 million partner merchant locations.

How a 2025 regulatory green light triggered the Shiba Inu coin retail boom in Japan

These steps intensify Rakuten’s competition with another Japanese retail giant — the marketplace Mercari and its crypto division Mercoin. Mercari has already integrated SHIB trading into its C2C app, allowing 23 million customers to buy the token from as little as 1 yen, using loyalty points or proceeds from selling second-hand goods. 

According to Mercoin’s financial reporting, this approach helped it attract 4 million users, or about 30% of all crypto accounts in Japan, and for 85% of them, this was their first experience with digital assets.

This kind of activity by major retailers is noticeably changing the landscape of the local crypto market, which for a long time remained almost entirely controlled by specialized exchanges. The mass use of SHIB in commercial campaigns became possible after the local regulator, the JVCEA, added the token to the official “Green List” of approved assets in November 2025.

Now major corporations are definitively rebuilding the industry around themselves, turning cheap meme tokens into familiar digital merchandise and a loyalty tool.