A look at the decimalization of meme coins like dogecoin and shiba inu, as retail investors plow money into them because they look cheap
or bothered, really — to go before.” https://www.bloombergquint.com/ ... Bloomberg Crypto / @crypto : In the highly unlikely event that Shiba Inu was to rise in value to $1, the amount circulating would be worth almost 10 times as much as the entire U.S. stock market https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands near the top of the meme-coin cycle it now helps explain. Dogecoin had already run from a $1B market cap in 2018 — when its own creator called it a sign of market excess — to $69B by May 2021, and weeks before this article Shiba Inu posted a 160% weekly surge that briefly made it the eighth-largest crypto.
The decimalization angle matters because it names the demand engine behind those moves: retail buyers treating a sub-cent token price as 'cheap,' ignoring that Shiba Inu's circulating supply means even $1 per coin would imply a valuation near ten times the entire U.S. stock market.
First-order effects
- Retail money keeps flowing into high-supply, low-unit-price coins like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin on the illusion of cheapness, concentrating new holders in assets whose per-token price says nothing about value.
- Shiba Inu's October flip of Dogecoin shows the playbook is portable: any meme token with trillions of units can manufacture the same sub-penny optics and capture the same flow.
Second-order effects
- Exchanges and wallets are pushed toward fractional-unit displays and per-dollar position sizing, since raw token counts mislead exactly the retail cohort driving volume.
- Token issuers gain an incentive to launch with enormous supplies and tiny unit prices, making decimalization a marketing lever rather than an accident of design.
Third-order effects
- The subsequent collapse — both coins down sharply from their peaks within weeks — validates the 2018 warning from Dogecoin's creator that unit-price euphoria signals broader market excess, not durable value.
- If the pattern holds, meme-coin cycles become a recurring case study in nominal-price bias, pushing regulators and platforms to treat unit-price framing as a consumer-protection issue rather than a quirk.
The trend: Meme coins keep cycling through retail-driven booms powered by cheap-unit psychology, with each bust re-exposing how little token price alone conveys about value.