Doge Coin. Good dog.
You probably never thought of Doge coin, or cared to invest in Doge coin until you read Elon Musk’s Tweet about it in the good ole days of the GameStop short squeeze.
Buyers pushed up Doge coin’s value by 359% in four weeks, most of it happening after Musk tweeted about it some two weeks ago. That’s better than Game Stop
Doge wins.
I don’t own it. When the world was in the thick of the GameStop drama, I bought Nokia instead. It’s down 20% from where I bought it. But don’t feel sorry for me, I barely blew $120 on it. I should have bought Doge.
“Doge coin is the ultimate members’ club: owning the coin is a secret hand signal that you’re part of the tribe and in on a $5 billion joke,” says Jehan Chu, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Kenetic Capital in Hong Kong. “Elon’s support of Doge is not naïve. He innately understands the value of the crypto street cred he gets by winking at Doge.”
Kris Marszalek, Co-Founder and CEO of Crypto.com, a trading platform, says they added Doge to their platform on January 29 due to high demand. It’s not available on Coinbase, a popular trading platform here. And Robinhood – the now infamous retail investor trading platform that banned users from buying GameStop — suspended Doge trading during peak demand.
“In the five days since it’s launch, Doge jumped into the top 10 most traded coins, with 44% coming from North America & 46% coming from Europe,” Marszalek said about its move on Crypto.com.
Beyond Doge: Alt-Coins to the Moon?
Designed by KMR for Forbes.
Now that everyone is feeling rich from Bitcoin, what else is there to buy? I sold all my XRP and bought Stella Lumens a month ago. I literally bought it because it was trading under a dollar and was a top 20 coin on Coinbase.
However, I did manage to find someone else who likes it, so this makes me feel better about my purchase.
“It’s my top holding at the moment,” says Mati Greenspan, Founder at Quantum Economics, about Bitcoin alternatives. “I feel it has excellent potential.” He has an eToro CopyTrader account here. I don’t follow it.
Greenspan is an advisor to a new company called Chiliz, which is getting into the fan token space for sports teams like Juventus, FC Barcelona, and AC Milan. “Just huge potential there,” he says of their coin CHZ. It’s worth about two cents.
I asked Daniel Wolfe, who runs a crypto fund out of Moscow at Halycon Global Opportunities, which was created by expats from the U.S. and London, to give me some altcoins I’ve never heard of. Two that he mentioned I had heard of: Cardano and Binance Coin.
“Cardano was founded by one of the active developers of Ethereum,” he says. “It’s a blockchain being built and released in stages, based on a number of design principles. It allows for economic transactions that contain more information that is important for institutional investors, corporations and regulators,” he says about why Cardano has been a favorite of the serious crypto money for the past three years. It’s priced under a dollar, so it’s not going to break anyone’s bank to take a couple hundred Cardano coins and put them in a Coinbase account and see what happens.
As for Binance: “The coin should appreciate because Binance continues to grow as one of the largest cryptoasset exchanges,” Wolfe says. By staking Binance Coin, investors can earn stakes in interesting new tokens.”
Last year at this time, Binance (BNB) was priced at around $21. It’s now over $70.
Over the last few months, BNB doesn’t look as good as Doge Coin. But over the longer term, it’s done much better.
In an interview on The Good Time Show via the Clubhouse app last Sunday night, Musk spoke about his recent foray as crypto influencer.
“I’ve got to watch what I say here because some of these things can really move the markets,” he joked. “Many friends of mine have tried to convince me to get involved in bitcoin for a long time. I should have bought some Bitcoin eight years ago,” he said.
Simon Kim, CEO of Hashed, which recently raised a $120 million VC fund, said he did not buy any more Bitcoins or altcoins during the social media-induced retail investor buzz.
“But we definitely feel that a much larger community has been formed around Bitcoin,” Kim says. As for Doge: “It’s like a commemorative coin that has no real use except for the cute emoticon. There is a saying, ‘if you want to measure the bubbles in the crypto market, look at the price of Doge.’ Now we are seeing an overall crypto bull market.”
If you had put $100 into Doge five years ago, it would be worth over $16,000 today.
It’s charts like this that get investors buying things they have no use for, know nothing about, and may end up wasting money on a joke coin.
This seems unreal.
If Doge is or was a joke coin, a lot of people are laughing all the way to the bank with it, as the saying goes.
“We’ve been involved in Doge coin for a very long time now, certainly before Elon Musk,” says Greenspan. “His tweets have been extremely welcome and have certainly been good for our clients. As with all markets, the risk is that you can lose your money. Especially since we’re talking about brand new markets and economic models. The inherent risk is that much higher. But so is the potential for reward.”
The multi-billion crypto economy, which is expected to grow to approximately $30 billion over the next six years, is going to bring in bigger, brand names. Blockchain companies will launch new services which will eventually be supported by a number of Fortune 500 companies who will help drive momentum, and sentiment for Bitcoin. And the alt coins with cute emoticons. May you pick the right dog in the race.