A visual representation of dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Yuriko Nakao | Getty Images
LONDON – Dogecoin is growing after billionaire Elon Musk and a number of celebrities have appeared to support the cryptocurrency on Twitter.
The meme-inspired token rose 65 percent in 24 hours to a record $ 0.083745 on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. ET, according to CoinMarketCap. Starting at 5 o’clock on Monday morning, the dogecoin increased by 25% at a price of 0.07415 USD.
The stellar execution of Dogecoin increased its market value to over 9.5 billion dollars – it briefly reached the maximum of 10.7 billion dollars on Sunday – becoming the digital currency no. 10 in the CoinMarketCap ranking.
On Sunday, at its intraday peak, dogecoin trading volume had reached about $ 13.5 billion in the last 24 hours.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 and is based on the popular “doge” meme of the time, which portrays a Shiba Inu dog with multicolored text in Comic Sans font. The cryptocurrency was originally started as a joke, but has won since then.
Retail investors have recently raised the price of the dogecoin, taking the cue from the tweets of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Over the years, Musk has written several times about dogecoin.
More recently, he posted a picture of a fictional magazine “Dogue” – a piece on the popular fashion title “Vogue” – leading to an 800% increase in the price of the dogecoin.
Musk later threw his support behind bitcoin, saying it was “on the verge of gaining widespread acceptance” in finance. But he added that he does not have a “strong opinion” on other virtual currencies and that his tweets about dogecoin are meant to be taken as jokes.
“But fate loves irony,” Musk said recently in the Clubhouse social audio app. “The funniest and most ironic result would be that the dogecoin will become the currency of the Earth in the future.”
Musk has seen several tweets about dogecoin. Just two days after saying he intended to take a break from Twitter “for a while,” Musk returned, posting a dogecoin meme and calling the symbol “the crypt of the people.”
He was joined by singers Snoop Dogg and Kiss Gene Simmons in posting tweets supporting dogecoin. Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., wrote on Twitter to Musk with a parody of one of his albums. The words on the album cover are replaced with “Snoop Doge”, while the doge image covers Broadus’ face.
Meanwhile, Gene Simmons – whose real name is Gene Klein – has actively promoted dogecoin to his followers, posting popular crypto slang phrases on Twitter, such as “HODL” and “to the moon.” Klein says he has made a “six-figure” investment in dogecoin and owns other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.
The episode is reminiscent of the cryptographic madness of late 2017, when the price of bitcoin rose to nearly $ 20,000 before dropping to nearly $ 3,000 the following year. Several celebrities backed crypto in 2017, some of them backing a controversial form of crowdfunding known as the “initial coin offering”.
The rebirth of Dogecoin in the last few weeks has also been due to the enthusiasm of a Reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets. Like the subreddit of WallStreetBets, which helped fuel the recent GameStop rally, SatoshiStreetBets aims to raise cryptocurrency prices.