Yes, Dogecoin (DOGE) started as a joke but it’s becoming increasingly harder to laugh at the Shiba Inu meme-based coin because of its market performance.
In fact, in some ways, the joke is on the doubters because as the world goes through one of its worst recessions, Dogecoin has increased in value by 32,000% in the past 12 months. Moreover, at the time of writing, it’s the 4th most popular cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization (over $75 bn), according to Coinmarketcap.
The latest milestone for Dogecoin is passing the $0.60 USD mark, which the cryptocurrency managed for the first time yesterday.
Like many of its recent rises, this latest surge in Dogecoin’s price is attributed, partially, to one of its famous and vocal supporters Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Musk is slated to hold the popular Saturday Night Live (SNL) this weekend. (This was an unusual choice for SNL because it normally selects People from the media industry.) Nevertheless, this announcement, made on Saturday, and Elon posting about it caused a frenzy among crypto investors, who wanted to capitalize on DOGE’s most famous backer’s appearance in mainstream media.
From Saturday, the price of DOGE has increased by over 60%, from $0.36 on Saturday to over $0.59 at the time of writing on Thursday.
The effects of this Dogecoin frenzy were also felt by popular trading app Robin Hood. The app crashed for about an hour on Monday because of increased interest in the cryptocurrency. This was the 2nd Dogecoin-related crash experienced by Robin Hood: on April 15th and 16th this year, some customers experienced order failures. The app did not share any technical details of the failure.
Elon Musk has been tweeting consistently about Dogecoin in the past year or so. His support has led to many surges in the crypto’s price, leading the internet to term his effect on the coin as “The Musk Effect.” Musk’s profile as a crypto enthusiast was also raised by Tesla buying $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and accepting cryptocurrencies as payment.
Besides Elon Musk, other celebrities, including Mark Cuban and Snoop Dogg have also shown support for Dogecoin. Another important development for Dogecoin was its listing on popular trading platforms Gemini and eToro.
Economists believe the Dogecoin price hike comes at a time when some recipients of government stimulus checks are investing in crypto assets and traditional assets like fiat currencies may lose their value because of inflation.
Dogecoin is an open-source digital currency created in 2013 by Adobe engineer Jackson Palmer and IBM software developer Billy Marcus. The purpose of the project was to make fun of the hype around the crypto sector. For this purpose, they chose the popular “doge” meme and set a supply of 100 billion tokens. Presently, there’s no limit on the number of Dogecoins that can be mined. Investors who wish to learn more should read either Dogecoin vs Bitcoin or Investing in Dogecoin.
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