In February, Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency became really popular. Here is a column about the altcoin meme’s journey from being a joke to billion-dollar capitalization project.
In 2013, the first bitcoin bull market occurred — it crossed the $130 mark and moved into an active growth phase, exceeding $1100 in a few months. The cryptocurrency sphere was becoming more and more popular. At the same time, two programmers — Billy Marcus from IBM and Jackson Palmer from Adobe — turned their attention to it. Palmer jokingly created the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, and Marcus joined him a few days after registering the domain Dogecoin.com.
The altcoin was issued on the Litecoin blockchain, making its issuance unlimited. Dogecoin immediately gained a community on the wave of cryptocurrency hype — only a month after its launch, Dogecoin.com was visited by more than a million people.
Reddit played no small role in the spread of the asset. Its users began to use the token for donations — coins were cheap, as well as transaction fees. The cryptocurrency was also used to fund the Jamaican bobsleigh team. Its performance at Sochi Olympics in 2014 was in jeopardy, and some of the funds were raised in the form of donations in Dogecoin.
This is not the only appearance of cryptocurrency in the world of sports. For example, in 2014, the community raised over $50,000 and placed an altcoin logo on a NASCAR racing series car.
The community is a distinctive feature of the project. This case occurred at the dawn of its inception, in December 2013. Then hackers stole almost all the coins from the Dogewallet platform. To help the affected customers of the platform, a fundraiser called “SaveDogemas” was organized. After a month, the amount of donations was enough to cover all the losses.
Elon Musk’s interest
In April 2019, the project conducted a mock poll on its Twitter, asking users to choose a new CEO. Among the contenders were Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk, and Metal startup CEO Marshall Hayner. Musk won almost half of the votes and was solemnly announced as the new head of Dogecoin.
“Dogecoin might be my favorite cryptocurrency. It’s very cool,” Musk wrote at the time. After that, he called himself the former CEO of the altcoin and published several joking tweets about it. However, businessman began to actively promote the asset almost two years later — at the beginning of 2021.
Dogecoin’s multiple growth in 2021
At the end of January, altcoin quotes rose 1115% in three days — it was trading at $0.007 on January 27 and set a historical high of $0.087 on the 29th. This growth was caused by the movement of WallStreetBets, which influenced the “pamp” shares of various companies, including Gamestop, a chain of video game stores.
Dogecoin’s first spike in quotes this year came after Twitter user WSB Chairman (938,000 followers) wrote about the cryptocurrency. He noted that a lot of people are talking about Dogecoin and asked what kind of asset it is.
However the growth turned out to be short-lived. Immediately after the price set a historical high of $0.087, there was a “dump”, the next day it fell almost 4 times, to $0.022. The cryptocurrency began to recover in February amid a slew of reports about it from Elon Musk.
On February 7, quotes of the asset on the crypto exchange Currency.com reached an all-time high above $0.089, after which it went into a decline phase again. As of February 24, the asset is trading at $0.052.