Elon Musk’s Twitter bio reads “Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars.” In reality, he’s the Tesla CEO, SpaceX boss and part-time hustler for meme-cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. The meme-cryptocurrency Elon Musk wouldn’t stop tweeting about has reached an all-time high on Wednesday. Then Musk decided to add to it further. According to Coindesk data, Dogecoin jumped to $0.14 at 10:25 IST, just 20 minutes after Elon Musk tweeted a painting about it. On Wednesday, it had risen to 70.22% in its last 24 hours – the highest ever recorded. Currently (at the time of writing this article) Dogecoin’s value is $0.$0.133093 or almost 13 cents. The market cap of DogeCoin — which started as a joke and is literally classified as “a memecoin” — is currently over $14 billion. This is the highest-ever for the cryptocurrency, and the result of a semi-ironic movement that’s involved thousands of buyers, tens of thousands of online posters and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
In early January, each token was worth less than one cent. In late January, when both the GameStop and DogeCoin movements hit their stride, the value of DogeCoin shot up to 7.5 cents, well over a 10-magnification, before sliding down to 2.5 cents. The coin has spent the past few months in the three- to the seven-cent range.
While crypto-Twitter was celebrating this win, Musk turned this up a notch by posting a painting, captioning it – a ‘Doge Barking at the Moon.’ And then the price of the cryptocurrency also jumped, well on its way ‘to the moon.’
The painting is ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’ by painting by Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miró. It was painted in 1926 in the town of Mont-roig del Camp, Catalonia. The painting was originally in the collection of Albert Eugene Gallatin before being bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1952, where it is currently located at present.
Doge Barking at the Moon pic.twitter.com/QFB81D7zOL— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2021
What is dogecoin? Dogecoin, much like Bitcoin, is a digital coin used for e-transactions. Doge is a reference to the ‘doge’ meme and has a picture of the shiba inu on it. It is a cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that, much like bitcoin, enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network.
Since its creation, Doge has also been used to donate money to charities. These have included the 2014 Jamaican Bobsled team who couldn’t afford to get to the Sochi Winter Olympics, a Nascar driver named Josh Wise, and a clean water project in Kenya called Doge4Water.
At the peak of the meme’s popularity in 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer, made a joke combining two of the internet’s most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge. He bought the Dogecoin.com domain and uploaded a photoshopped Shibe on a coin.
“If you want to make Dogecoin a reality, get in touch,” said the website. On the other side of the world, Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM, got in touch and set Dogecoin live. Dogecoin soared up by more than 60 per cent over the last 24 hours and experienced a 1,421 per cent increase in trading volume according to crypto data firm CoinMarketCap.
The peak price of Dogecoin in 2018 was around two cents, right before it crashed along with the rest of cryptocurrency. Reports suggest that by early 2019, Dogecoin had lost nearly 90 per cent of its value and was trading for a fraction of a penny, until now.
While the ‘Musk effect’ is now becoming a common Internet slang, this isn’t the first, second or even third time Elon Musk has tweeted about Dogecoin, raising its prices.
Musk who has been consistently tweeting about the meme cryptocurrency for a while led to the all-time-high $0.065448, up about 35% from its 24-hour low of $0.048356, according to CoinDesk in early February. The cryptocurrency’s price later dropped again before climbing back to about 25% gain. The Shiba Inu-themed digital coin had then surpassed 8 cents for the first time, just a week after crashing to 2.5 cents and sparking an outcry on Reddit.
Musk had said that he supports major holders of the meme-based digital currency Dogecoin selling most of their coins, adding that he felt too much concentration in Dogecoin was the “real issue”.
“If major Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is the only real issue imo,” he said in a tweet. But that wasn’t all – he offered to pay ‘actual dollar’ for it.
Musk in February had posted a Twitter poll, asking his 45.8 million followers to choose “the future currency of Earth.” He gave two options: “Dogecoin to the Moooonn” or “All other crypto combined.”
The poll resulted in 71.3% of the 2.4 million voters saying that “Dogecoin to the Moooonn” would be the future of currency.
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