SINGAPORE, Nov 8 (Reuters) – This is no joke. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has put a new wind in the sails of dogecoin, the same cryptocurrency he catapulted to fame.
Dogecoin’s price doubled after tycoon Tesla closed the $44 billion deal. It was trading at around $0.07 on October 27 before Musk tweeted “the bird is released” to announce its ownership. Five days later it was at $0.16.
It may not seem like much, but it gave the highly volatile cryptocurrency a market value of $21 billion, according to data platform CoinGecko.
Not bad for a coin that was created as a “joke” satirizing wild speculation in the crypto market and named after an internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog.
“Dogecoin trading around Elon’s tweets has become a form of lucrative speculation,” said Matthew Dibb, chief operating officer of Singapore-based crypto investment manager Stack Funds.
Musk has indeed played a big role in dogecoin’s rise since it was cheerfully launched by two software engineers in 2013. His tweets expressing his support for the coin, including one calling it the “people’s crypto”, have helped its price come out of almost nowhere. about 4,000% in 2021.
Crypto watchers said the latest price hike, following the Twitter deal, was fueled by bets from investors that Musk would make Doge part of the platform’s payment system.
“There is a lot of speculation that Twitter will provide a test bed for adopting and experimenting with doges for different uses,” Dibb added.
DOGE AND SHIB
Dogecoin, has since lost some of its gains and is hovering around $0.12, making it the eighth largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of around $16 billion, according to CoinGecko.
The so-called meme coin peaked at $0.63 in May last year, but macroeconomic gloom and investor apathy in risky markets have since crushed it along with other major crypto assets. such as bitcoin and ether. Even after the last rally, the doge is down 57% in the last 12 months.
Nonetheless, crypto market news website Coindesk said its doubling in price made Doge the best among 150 digital assets in its market index CoinDesk in October.
Its share of the $1 trillion global crypto market cap throughout the year to the end of October was 1%, a fraction of bitcoin’s 39%, according to CoinMarketCap. It is now at 1.58%.
Doge has lifted other dog-themed coins in its wake, primarily Shiba Inu, which has the same Japanese canine breed pattern as doge and is designed to be compatible on the Ethereum blockchain. Shib, which trades at just $0.00001, jumped a third in the days after Musk closed the Twitter deal.
Unlike bitcoin, doge and shib have nearly unlimited stocks, meaning it would take more than just speculative hoarding to drive their prices up.
A MERCY OF MUSK?
Bets that Musk could allow crypto payments with dog tokens were ignited by his tweet last week of a photo of the dog Shiba Inu wearing a Twitter T-shirt.
Still, the start of the rally has stalled, with many crypto investors puzzled over how seriously it really takes dogecoin.
Musk, the world’s richest person, called dogecoin a “hustle” on a talk show in May last year, for example, driving the price down.
Then, in January of this year, Tesla began accepting dogecoins as payment for its merchandise, such as “Giga Texas” belt buckles and mini electric vehicle models.
Musk’s new “Burnt Hair” fragrance can also be purchased with doge.
Reporting by Vidya Ranganathan; Assembly Pravin Char
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