Crypto.com Holds 20% of Its Reserves in Meme Token SHIB

Notable cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com revealed today that it holds 20% of its reserves in the Shiba Inu (SHIB) token—a highly speculative “meme coin.”

Data from blockchain analysis firm Nansen shows that the platform holds the largest share (31%) of its digital assets in Bitcoin, followed by SHIB at 20%. Nansen’s data reveals that Crypto.com has about $570 million worth of the Ethereum-based meme coin.

Crypto.com’s reserves also feature a significant quantity of Ethereum itself, making up about 17% of the firm’s holdings, while the Tether (USDT) and USDC stablecoins each make up about 5% of the exchange’s reserves. Various other cryptocurrencies and tokens collectively account for another 20% of the total.

The exchange revealed its reserves through an array of wallet addresses, which Nansen then collected into a single dashboard. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek confirmed the data from the dashboard via a tweet, and said that the exchange will provide additional details on its complete holdings in the next couple of weeks.

The news comes as FTX, one of the largest and most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, went bankrupt this week following a significant liquidity crisis. It led the White House to call for greater regulation of the industry, and currently leaves customers with potentially billions of dollars’ worth of inaccessible assets on the FTX platform.

SHIB is the 14th-largest cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap of $5.7 billion, according to data from CoinGecko. It’s an ERC-20 token—meaning it runs on the Ethereum network—and a competitor to Dogecoin, the original “meme coin” that gained greater popularity and notoriety as Elon Musk latched onto it.

Meme coins are cryptocurrencies and tokens that are typically inspired by internet memes. They often don’t have significant functional utility, and their prices can change rapidly and dramatically.

SHIB quickly swings up and down in price and is currently worth $0.000009774634 per token—88.6% less than its all-time high. In 2021, its market cap briefly touched over $41 billion, giving it a larger market cap than many companies in the S&P 500.