In December 2013, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer unleashed Dogecoin on the world.
With a website and wallet featuring the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the Doge meme (and horrific amounts of Comic Sans), it was a memecoin that soon made headlines with its absurdity. Seven years on, it’s celebrating its official day (Dogeday 4/20), and has even solidly outperformed Bitcoin over the past week.
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Earlier today, the price of a single DOGE jumped up by 18% to 42 cents. That’s just short of the coin’s all-time high of 45 cents, which was achieved at the end of last week. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was down 4.6%, trading at $54,763.19 this morning, with Ethereum — the second largest crypto currency — also down by 5.3%, trading at $2,134. Though DOGE later dropped to a price of 35 cents (as of the time of writing), it's still way up on its value of roughly 9 cents just a week ago.
While it seems like we’ve entered an absurd Twilight Zone-like era of unpredictable financial turbulence, there is some method to this madness. Sort of.
In an age of likes, shares and virality, a single tweet from, say, someone with the social clout and influence of Elon Musk can cause a surge in price, with people snapping up anything from Dogecoin to NFTs, purely “for the lols.”
Musk, incidentally, is one of the main reasons for Dogecoin’s recent meteoric rise in popularity. In January, it shot up by over 800% in just 24 hours to reach $0.07, inspired partly by reddit’s GameStop short squeeze movement, and partly by Musk tweeting a picture of a Vogue magazine cover parody called Dogue, to his 51.6 million followers. Yes, really.
pic.twitter.com/a6kmk0PEgMJanuary 28, 2021
Throw in the fact that Dogeday falls on 4/20 (the recognised national holiday for marijuana enthusiasts), and the fact that its overall worth is around that of Dell, and we’re starting to think that anything really is possible.
Users on sites such as Reddit and Twitter are continuing to urge people to buy DOGE in the hope of driving the price up to a dollar. And given the events of the past few months, we honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they succeeded. Now the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world in terms of market cap, the people shouting “DOGE to the moon” seven years ago are definitely enjoying this crazy ride the most, and quite frankly, they deserve it.
