Tweets from Elon Musk and celebrities send dogecoin to a record high
LONDON — Dogecoin is surging after billionaire Elon Musk and a number of celebrities appeared to back the cryptocurrency on Twitter.
The meme-inspired token rallied 65% in 24 hours to a record high of $0.083745 at 5:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. As of 5 a.m. ET Monday, dogecoin was up 25% at a price of $0.07415.
Dogecoin's stellar run has boosted its market value to over $9.5 billion — it briefly hit a high of $10.7 billion Sunday — making it the No. 10 digital coin on CoinMarketCap's ranking.
At its intraday peak Sunday, trading volume in dogecoin had reached around $13.5 billion in the last 24 hours.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 and is based on the then-popular "doge" meme which portrays a Shiba Inu dog alongside multi-colored text in Comic Sans font. The cryptocurrency was initially started as a joke but has since gained a following.
Retail investors have pumped up dogecoin's price recently, taking their cue from the tweets of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has tweeted about dogecoin several times over the years.
More recently, he posted a picture of a fictional "Dogue" magazine — a play on the popular fashion title "Vogue" — leading to an 800% surge in dogecoin's price.
Musk subsequently threw his support behind bitcoin, saying it is "on the verge of getting broad acceptance" in finance. But he added he doesn't have a "strong opinion" on other virtual currencies and that his tweets about dogecoin are meant to be taken as jokes.
"But fate loves irony," Musk said recently on the social audio app Clubhouse. "The most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future."
Musk has seen made several tweets about dogecoin. Just two days after saying he planned to take a break from Twitter "for a while," Musk returned, posting dogecoin memes and calling the token "the people's crypto."
He has been joined by the likes of Snoop Dogg and Kiss singer Gene Simmons in posting tweets backing dogecoin. Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., tweeted at Musk with a parody of one of his albums. The words on the album cover are replaced with "Snoop Doge" while the doge image covers Broadus' face.
Meanwhile, Gene Simmons — whose actual name is Gene Klein — has actively promoted dogecoin to his followers, tweeting popular slang phrases in crypto like "HODL" and "to the moon." Klein says he made a "six figure" investment in dogecoin and also owns other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.
The episode is reminiscent of the late-2017 crypto craze, when bitcoin's price skyrocketed to almost $20,000 before plummeting close to $3,000 the following year. Multiple celebrities had hyped up crypto in 2017, with some endorsing a controversial form of crowdfunding known as an "initial coin offering."
Dogecoin's resurgence in the last few weeks has also been down to enthusiasm from a Reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets. Like the WallStreetBets subreddit, which helped fuel the recent GameStop rally, SatoshiStreetBets aims to pump up the prices of cryptocurrencies.
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