DogeCoin, a crypto-currency created to parody the insanity of critical currencies, reached a milestone on Tuesday when the price rose to 11.5 cents, the first time the cryptocurrency has exceeded 10 cents in value. The market capitalization of DogeCoin – which started as a joke and literally as “a memecoin“- is currently just over $ 14 billion.
It is the culmination of a semi-ironic movement involving thousands of buyers, tens of thousands of online posters and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Just like the Wall Street Bets Reddit community pumped the GameStop share up to $ 1,000 per share (it rose to $ 483, less than the target, but a dramatic rise from the 52-week low of $ 3.77), cryptocurrency communities became attached to the idea of ”sending” DogeCoin up to 10 cents.
In early January, each sign was worth less than one cent. At the end of January, when both the GameStop and DogeCoin movements made progress, the value of DogeCoin rose to 7.5 cents, well above a 10-cent increase, before slipping to 2.5 cents. The currency has spent the past few months in the range of three to seven cents. The price began to rise on Sunday, by about six cents, before breaking the 10-cent milestone.
As you can imagine, crypto-Twitter is excited.
Musk, DogeCoin’s most popular supporter, has been extremely quiet over the past few days. On April 10, he tweeted ‘… going to the moon very soon’, which many saw as a reference to DogeCoin. In February he tweeted that DogeCoin along with Lion King art is ‘the people’s crypto’, which caused the price to rise by 50%. It’s unclear whether Musk’s enthusiasm for DogeCoin is part of his ironic meme-loving public persona or part of a strategy to spark interest in cryptocurrency. Days after that tweet, Musk’s Tesla company buys $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
If you are at all familiar with cryptocurrency, you know Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum. These are the two largest cryptocurrencies, but underneath them is an entire market of smaller markets called ‘altcoins’ – or sometimes ‘shitcoins’. It’s like the penny stocks of the cryptocurrency world. Many intend or claim to be useful or improve the facets of the Ethereum blockchain, on which most altcoins are built. Others are ‘memecoins’, which are rising and falling in popularity simply because they are quite funny.
DogeCoin, created in 2013, was the first such memecoin. There are many others, and they are ridiculous. One simply called Meme, which launched at $ 1 last year and now trades at over $ 2000.