After surging 800% last week on the back of frenzied speculative trading by retail investors, Dogecoin or DOGE was back in the limelight on Thursday with the cryptocurrency surging over 58% after tweets from Tesla chief Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person came out in support of the digital currency, tweeting, “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”. Another tweet read, “No highs, no lows, only Doge.”
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As per data available with cryptocurrency tracker CoinGecko, DOGE was trading 58.4% higher at $0.050 at around 8.40pm IST. The crypto asset traded in a range of $0.031 to $0.058 over the past 24 hours, and its seven-day return stands at 576%.
DOGE, which was created as a satirical critique of the crypto frenzy in 2013, surged over 800% last week within a span of 24 hours after drawing the attention of Redditors. Earlier, shares of GameStop also had seen a massive rally after drawing attention on social media and chat rooms, including Reddit.
Bitcoin also surged above the $38,000 level after Musk came out in its support on Friday.
According to the international cryptocurrency exchange Binance, having Musk as a supporter is a positive for DOGE. However, it added that one address (which is used to receive and send funds over the blockchain network) holding 27% of all DOGE is negative for the asset.
Limited ownership of a cryptocurrency makes it more susceptible to volatility.
After hitting a high of $38,741.58 in the past 24 hours, Bitcoin pared some of the gains and was trading 1.27% lower at $36,483.03. Other major crypto assets such as ether and stellar were trading up to 7% in the red.
Meanwhile, crypto exchanges in India were still worried about the Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, listed in the legislative order of business for the budget session of 17th Lok Sabha that commenced on Friday.