Elon Musk’s Dogecoin tweet has believers barking for more

Dogecoin is named after an internet meme that appeared almost a decade ago. The meme centered around an image of a Shiba Inu dog with bad spelling habits (so doge instead of dog). Users have Photoshopat the dog’s fur face on everything from astronauts to Twinkies.

In 2013, software developer Billy Markus aimed to gain the popularity of bitcoin and decided to create his own lightweight cryptocurrency. He first based it on the video game “Animal Crossing” and called it bells, named after the game’s pretending currency.

People online hated her, he said. So when another developer, Jackson Palmer, shared a new idea for a cryptocurrency based on doge memes, Mr. Markus reconfigured his bell code to match the meme.

He set out to create a coin so ridiculous that it could never be taken seriously. In exchange for solving math puzzles, dogecoin miners operating fast-moving computers received anywhere from a dogecoin to hundreds of thousands of dogecoins.

The currency had a passing moment of fame when it began. In 2014, his online supporters helped fund the Jamaican bobsled team’s trip to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and sent a Nasco dogecoin slider to Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Like most memes, it has disappeared from relevance.

Then came Mr. Musk. On January 28th posted a fake cover of “Dogue” magazine on Twitter.

Dogecoin appeared as a topic on WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that incubated GameStop trading Body.

At the end of January, the price of the dogecoin rose from half a cent to 8 cents, where it had traded at the beginning of the month.

Chief billionaire Tesla posted again on Twitter on Thursday, breaking what he said will be a hiatus on the social media platform. “No highs, no lows, just Doge,” he posted. Dogecoin immediately increased by 80% during the day, before making gains.

The Dogecoin network, maintained by volunteers, endeavored to accommodate the influx of buyers. Volunteers raised real money – in euros – to buy more server space.

Mr. Markus, who no longer works at dogecoin, could not believe that the code he wrote in three hours on Sunday gave rise to a cryptocurrency worth a total of billions of dollars.

“The idea for the 8-cent dogecoin is the same as the $ 325 GameStop,” said Markus, 38. “It does not make sense. It’s super absurd. The design of the coin was absurd. ”

Users can buy dogecoin with a credit card on cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms, including Robinhood Markets Inc.

Damian Wawrzyniak, a chef at a restaurant in Peterborough, England, hadn’t heard of the dogecoin before Mr. Musk tweeted about it. He quickly collected some through a cryptocurrency brokerage account that he used during the Covid-19 blockade.

Dogecoin is “a completely strange name,” he said, but realized that Mr. Musk, who has about 45 million followers on Twitter, has added to his attraction.

In late January, a small cohort of protesters gathered in front of Robinhood headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to protest the broker’s restrictions on GameStop trading, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.

and other companies that were popular on Reddit.

As Dave Jevans, executive director of cryptocurrency firm CipherTrace, made his way to the grocery store, a woman approached him and encouraged him to join.

“The market is rigged,” she said.

“Buy bitcoin,” he joked to her.

“No, no, no,” she said excitedly. “Buy dogecoin!” You saw her? I think we can get to a dollar. ”

A vocal group of Reddit shoppers pushed their mantra to push the dogecoin to $ 1. TikTok Investors Twitter account posted a video of a woman dressed in purple training clothes singing about taking dogecoin “to the moon”.

In theory, it will be difficult for the dogecoin to reach $ 1. Unlike bitcoin, which limits the number that can be extracted to 21 million, dogecoin does not have such a limit. However, the rise of GameStop has reminded investors that anything is possible.

The new cryptocurrency craze has even found converts who once despised dogecoin. Angelicah Shaver, a 28-year-old graduate student who runs a cryptocurrency-focused YouTube channel, called him in a tweet in early January “Literally an insult to the tech community” since its creation.

But as the hype grew, she decided to use it as an opportunity to teach cryptocurrency beginners how to buy, sell and analyze coins. She bought $ 1,000 of dogecoin in the last week of January, just before its price rose and maintained its position.

“Fate loves irony and it’s so true,” she said. “I have spoken against the Dogecoin so many times. I literally said that dogecoin is an insult to technology, and here I keep this doge bag. ”

Write to Caitlin Ostroff at [email protected] and Paul Vigna at [email protected]