DogeCoin, a cryptocurrency created to parody the insanity of crytpocurrencies, reached a milestone on Tuesday when the price soared to 11.5 cents, the first time the cryptocurrency exceeded 10 cents in value. The market cap of DogeCoin — which started as a joke and is literally classified as “a memecoin” — is currently just over $14 billion.
It’s the culmination of a semi-ironic movement that’s involved thousands of buyers, tens of thousands of online posters and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Just like the Wall Street Bets Reddit community rallied around pumping the GameStop stock up to $1,000-per-share (it got up to $483, short of the goal but a dramatic spike from the 52-week low of $3.77), cryptocurrency communities became attached to the idea of “sending” DogeCoin to 10 cents.
In early January, each token was worth less than one cent. In late January, when both the GameStop and DogeCoin movements hit their stride, the value of DogeCoin shot up to 7.5 cents, well over a 10-magnification, before sliding down to 2.5 cents. The coin has spent the past few months in the three- to seven-cent range. On Sunday, its price began to rise, from around six cents, before it smashed the 10-cent milestone.
As you can imagine, crypto-Twitter is excited.
Musk, the most high-profile supporter of DogeCoin, has been unusually quiet in the past few days. On April 10, he tweeted “…going to the moon very soon,” which many took to be a reference to DogeCoin. In February, he tweeted that DogeCoin is “the people’s crypto” alongside Lion King art, causing the price to shoot up 50%. It’s unclear if Musk’s enthusiasm for DogeCoin is part of his ironic-meme loving public persona or part of a strategy to drum up interest in cryptocurrency. Days after that tweet, Musk’s Tesla company bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
If you’re familiar with cryptocurrency at all, you know Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum. Those are the two biggest cryptocurrencies, but underneath them is an entire market of smaller ones called “altcoins” — or, sometimes, “shitcoins.” These are like the penny stocks of the cryptocurrency world. Many aim or claim to have utility, or improve facets of the Ethereum blockchain, upon which most altcoins are built. Others are “memecoins,” which rise and fall in popularity simply because they’re kind of funny.
Created in 2013, DogeCoin was the first such memecoin. There are many others, and they’re preposterous. One simply called Meme launched last August at $1 and now trades at over $2,000.