A visual representation of dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Yuriko Nakao | Getty Images
LONDON – Dogecoin is on the rise after billionaire Elon Musk and a number of celebrities apparently supported the cryptocurrency on Twitter.
The meme-inspired sign rose 65% in 24 hours to a record high of $ 0.083745 at 17:30 ET on Sunday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Starting at 5 a.m. ET Monday, dogecoin rose 25% to $ 0.07415.
Dogecoin’s stellar run increased its market value to more than $ 9.5 billion – it briefly peaked at $ 10.7 billion on Sunday – making it the number 10 digital coin on CoinMarketCap’s rankings.
At its intraday peak Sunday, trading volume in dogecoin reached about $ 13.5 billion over the past 24 hours.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 and is based on the then popular “doge” meme that depicts a Shiba Inu dog along with multicolored text in the Comic Sans font. The crypto-currency was initially started as a joke, but has since gotten the following.
Retail investors have pushed up the price of dogecoin recently, with the tweet from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. Musk has tweeted about dogecoin several times over the years.
More recently, he posted a photo of a fictional magazine ‘Dogue’ – a play about the popular fashion title ‘Vogue’ – which led to an 800% rise in the price of dogecoin.
Musk then threw his support behind bitcoin, saying it was “about to gain broad acceptance” in finance. But he added that he does not have a “strong opinion” about other virtual currencies and that his tweets about dogecoin should be considered jokes.
“But fate likes irony,” Musk said recently on the social audio app Clubhouse. “The most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the Earth’s currency in the future.”
Musk has already seen several tweets about dogecoin. Just two days after saying he plans to take a breather from Twitter for a while, Musk returned, posting dogecoin memes and calling the sign ‘the people’s crypto’.
Like Snoop Dogg and Kiss, singer Gene Simmons, he posted with him tweets supporting dogecoin. Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. is, tweeted on Musk with a parody on 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 – is actively promoting dogecoin to his followers and tweeting popular slang phrases in crypto such as “HODL” and “to the moon”. Klein says he has made a “six-digit” investment in dogecoin and also owns other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.
The episode is reminiscent of the late-2017 crypto craze, when bitcoin’s price soared to nearly $ 20,000 before dropping nearly $ 3,000 the following year. Several celebrities took crypto under scrutiny in 2017, and some endorse a controversial form of crowdfunding known as an ‘initial coin offering’.
The rise of Dogecoin over the past few weeks is also due to enthusiasm from a Reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets. Like the WallStreetBets subreddit, which sparked the recent GameStop rally, SatoshiStreetBets aims to raise the prices of cryptocurrencies.