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 appeared to be backing the cryptocurrency on Twitter.
The meme-inspired token rose 65% in 24 hours to a record high of $ 0.083745 at 5:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. As of Monday 5 p.m. ET, dogecoin rallied 25% at a price of $ 0.07415.
Dogecoin’s stellar run has boosted its market value to over $ 9.5 billion – it briefly peaked at $ 10.7 billion on Sunday – making it the number 10 digital coin in CoinMarketCap’s rankings.
At the peak of the day on Sunday, the volume of trade in dogecoin was about $ 13.5 billion over the past 24 hours.
Created in 2013, Dogecoin is based on the then-popular “doge” meme depicting a Shiba Inu dog alongside multicolored text in Comic Sans font. The cryptocurrency initially started as a joke, but has since gained a following.
Retail investors recently pumped up the price of dogecoin, based on the tweets from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. 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% increase in the price of dogecoin.
Musk then threw his support behind bitcoin, saying it is “on the verge of widespread adoption” in the financial world. But he added that he doesn’t have a “strong opinion” on other virtual currencies and that his tweets about dogecoin are meant to be jokes.
“But fate likes irony,” Musk recently said on the social audio app Clubhouse. “The most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin will become Earth’s currency in the future.”
Musk has seen several tweets about dogecoin. Just two days after saying he planned to take a break from Twitter “for a while,” Musk returned, posted dogecoin memes, and called the token “the people’s crypto.”
He has been joined by Snoop Dogg and Kiss singer Gene Simmons in posting tweets in support of dogecoin. Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. is, tweeted to Musk with a parody of one of his albums. The words on the album cover have been replaced with “Snoop Doge”, while the image of the doge covers Broadus’s face.
Meanwhile, Gene Simmons – whose real name is Gene Klein – has been actively promoting dogecoin to his followers, tweeting popular crypto slang phrases 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 crypto craze of late 2017, when bitcoin’s price skyrocketed to nearly $ 20,000 before plunging to nearly $ 3,000 the following year. Multiple celebrities had hyped crypto in 2017, with some endorsing a controversial form of crowdfunding known as a ‘first coin offering’.
Dogecoin’s resurgence in recent weeks is also due to the enthusiasm of a Reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets. Like the WallStreetBets subreddit, which sparked the recent GameStop rally, SatoshiStreetBets aims to drive up the prices of cryptocurrencies.