Tweeting Elon Musk’s Dogecoin makes believers bark for more

Dogecoin is named after an internet meme that surfaced almost a decade ago. The meme was centered around an image of a Shiba Inu dog with bad spelling habits (so doge instead of dog). Users photoshop the dog’s furry face on everything from astronauts to Twinkies.

In 2013, software developer Billy Markus saw bitcoin gain in popularity and decided to create his own light-hearted cryptocurrency. He first based it on the video game “Animal Crossing” and called it clocks, named after the game’s fake currency.

People online hated it, he said. So when another developer, Jackson Palmer, shared a new idea for a cryptocurrency based on the doge meme, Mr. Markus reconfigured his clock code to match the meme.

He wanted to make a coin so ridiculous it could never be taken seriously. In exchange for solving math puzzles, dogecoin miners working on high-speed computers received anywhere from one dogecoin to hundreds of thousands of dogecoins.

The coin had a fleeting moment of fame when it started. In 2014, her online supporters aided the Jamaican bobsleigh team’s journey to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, sending a dogecoin Nascar racer to the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Like most memes, it faded from relevance.

Then Mr. Musk came. On 28 Jan. he tweeted a fake “Dogue” magazine cover.

Dogecoin rose as a topic on WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that incubated GameStop trading Corp.

In late January, dogecoin’s price rose from half a cent to 8 cents where it was traded at the beginning of the month.

The billionaire Tesla boss tweeted about it again on Thursday, breaking what he said would be a break from the social media platform. “No highs, no lows, just Doge,” he posted. Dogecoin immediately shot up 80% intraday, before pegging profits.

Dogecoin’s network, maintained by volunteers, struggled to accommodate the influx of buyers. The volunteers collected real money – in euros – to buy more server space.

Mr. Markus, who is no longer working on dogecoin, couldn’t believe that the code he wrote in three hours on a Sunday gave rise to a cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars in total market value.

“The idea that dogecoin is worth 8 cents is the same as GameStop is worth $ 325,” said Mr. Markus, 38 years old. ‘It does not make any sense. It’s super absurd. The coin’s design was absurd. “

Users can buy dogecoin with a credit card on cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms including Robinhood Markets Inc.

Damian Wawrzyniak, a chef at a restaurant in Peterborough, England, had never heard of dogecoin before Musk tweeted about it. He quickly pulled some up through a cryptocurrency brokerage account he used during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Dogecoin is “an utterly strange name,” he said, but he thought Mr. Musk, who has about 45 million Twitter followers, increases its appeal.

In late January, a small group of protesters gathered outside Robinhood’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to protest the broker’s restrictions on GameStop trading, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.

and other companies popular on Reddit.

As Dave Jevans, the chief executive of crypto analytics firm CipherTrace, walked past on his way to the grocery store, a woman approached and encouraged him to join.

“The market is set up,” she said.

“Buy bitcoin,” he joked to her.

“No, no, no,” she retorted excitedly. “Buy Dogecoin! Did you see it? I think we can get it on a dollar. “

A vocal group of buyers on Reddit have made it their mantra to push dogecoin to $ 1. The Twitter account TikTok Investors posted a video of a woman in purple sportswear sing about taking dogecoin “to the moon.”

In theory, it will be difficult for dogecoin to hit $ 1. Unlike bitcoin, which has the number that can be mined at 21 million, dogecoin has no such limit. However, the rise of GameStop has reminded investors that anything is possible.

The renewed zeal for the cryptocurrency has even found converts who once belittled dogecoin. Angelicah Shaver, a 28-year-old college graduate who runs a YouTube channel focusing on cryptocurrencies, mentioned it in a tweet in early January “Literally an insult to the tech community” since its inception.

But as the hype grew, she decided to use it as an opportunity to teach newcomers to cryptocurrency how to buy, sell, and analyze coins. She bought $ 1,000 worth of dogecoin in the last week of January, just before the price skyrocketed, and is holding on to her position.

“Fate likes irony, and it is so true,” she said. “I have spoken out against dogecoin so many times. I have literally said that dogecoin is an insult to technology, and here I now have this bag of doge in my hands. “

Write to Caitlin Ostroff at [email protected] and Paul Vigna at [email protected]