Singapore: Mr. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has given Dogecoin, the meme cryptocurrency the Tesla owner popularised, a new life.
After the tech entrepreneur closed the $44 billion deal, the price of Dogecoin doubled. On October 27, the cryptocurrency was selling for roughly $0.07 when Mr. Musk announced his ownership by tweeting “the bird is freed.” The selling price of the coming was $0.16 five days later.
That might not sound like much, but according to analytics platform CoinGecko, the development with Twitter gave the extremely volatile cryptocurrency a market worth of $21 billion. Not bad for a coin named after an online meme of a Shiba Inu dog and created as a “joke” mocking the rampant speculation in the cryptocurrency market.
According to Mr. Matthew Dibb, Chief Operating Officer of Singapore-based cryptocurrency investment manager Stack Funds, “Trading dogecoin around Elon Musk’s tweets has become a lucrative form of speculation,” Since its humorous launch by two software engineers in 2013, Mr. Musk has in fact had a significant impact on dogecoin’s growth. The Telsa owner’s tweets about the coin, including one that called it “the people’s crypto,” caused its price to jump by about 4,000 percent out of nowhere in 2021.
Crypto experts said that the most recent price rise, which happened after Twitter was bought, was caused by investors’ bets that Mr. Musk will add doge to the platform’s payment system. According to Mr. Dibb, there is a lot of conjecture that Twitter will serve as a testing ground for doge adoption and experimentation for various uses.
Doge and Shib
According to CoinGecko, Dogecoin is currently trading at around $0.12 and is the eighth-largest cryptocurrency with a market worth of roughly $16 billion. However, it has since given up some of its gains. The so-called meme currency reached a high of $0.63 in May last year, but it has since been destroyed along with other well-known crypto assets like bitcoin and ether due to macro-doom and investor apathy toward hazardous markets. Doge as lost 57 percent of its value over the last 12 months, notwithstanding the most recent rise.
Despite this, the 150 digital assets in the CoinDesk Market Index’s best performance list for October were doge, according to the cryptocurrency market news website Coindesk. According to CoinMarketCap, Degecoin’s percentage of the $1 trillion worldwide cryptocurrency market cap for the year up through the end of October was 1 percent, far less than bitcoin’s 39 percent. It is currently 1.58 percent.
Doge has inspired several canine-themed coins, most notably Shiba Inu, which shares the same motif as Doge and is built to work with the Ethereum blockchain. Shib, which is only worth $0.00001, increased by a third in the days following Musk’s completion of the Twitter transaction.
Unlike bitcoin, Doge and Shib can be made in almost unlimited amounts, so it would take more than speculation to drive up their prices.