Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter brought fresh air to dogecoin, the meme cryptocurrency he catapulted to fame.
Dogecoin’s price doubled after Tesla’s chief executive completed the $44 billion purchase of the social network. The cryptocurrency was trading at around $0.07 on October 27 before Musk wrote that “the bird has been released” to announce his acquisition. Five days later, the asset value was at $0.16.
That might not seem like much, but it gave the highly volatile cryptocurrency a market cap of $21 billion, according to data platform CoinGecko.
“Trading dogecoin around Elon’s tweets has become a lucrative form of speculation,” said Matthew Dibb, COO at Stack Funds, a cryptocurrency investment manager.
Musk has really played a big role in dogecoin’s rise since its carefree launch by two software engineers in 2013. His tweets expressing support for the coin, including one calling it “the people’s crypto,” helped its price soar by around 4,000%. in 2021.
Doge and Shib
Dogecoin has lost some of its gains and is at around $0.12, which makes it the eighth-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of around $16 billion, according to CoinGecko.
The meme coin peaked at $0.63 in May last year, but macroeconomic conditions and investor apathy for risky markets have crushed it, along with other prominent digital assets such as bitcoin and ether. Even after the last rally, the doge has dropped 57% in the last 12 months.
However, cryptocurrency market news website Coindesk said that the doubling of its price made Doge the top performer among 150 digital assets on its CoinDesk Market Index in October.
Its share of the $1 trillion global cryptocurrency market cap over the year to the end of October was 1%, a fraction of bitcoin’s 39%, according to CoinMarketCap, currently accounting for 1.58%.
The doge has raised other dog-themed coins, most notably the Shiba Inu, which has the same Japanese canine breed motif as the doge and is designed to be compatible with the Ethereum blockchain. Shib, which trades at just $0.00001, jumped a third in the days after Musk struck the deal with Twitter.
Unlike bitcoin, both doge and shib have near-limitless supplies, meaning that it would take more than mere speculative accumulation to raise their prices.
Source: CNN Brasil
Joe Jameson, a technology journalist with over 2 years of experience, writes for top online news websites. Specializing in the field of technology, Joe provides insights into the latest advancements in the industry. Currently, he contributes to covering the world stock market.
