Musk helps fuel rise of crypto dogecoin

LONDON: Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created as a laugh in 2013, has seen its value leap in recent days, after humorous messages about any of it from tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The buying price of Dogecoin Slot Gacor, which has traded just fractions of a cent for nearly all of its existence, surged last week amid a buying frenzy surrounding the GameStop saga.

Then Musk’s messages on the topic, including him dubbing it “the people’s crypto” on Thursday, sent its value soaring overnight by around 50 percent.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder followed up the endorsement by posting a doctored image from the Lion King. He lifts the cryptocurrency’s mascot image of a Shiba Inu dog above his head in triumph.

Earlier in the week, the entrepreneur had said on Clubhouse — a social network accessible only by invitation — that his messages on dogecoin “are just supposed to be jokes.”

His seemingly ironic humor regarding the cryptocurrency resembles the tone of messages on online platform Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum.

A small grouping of amateur investors sharing gifs and memes joined forces last week against significant hedge funds betting against game store GameStop, causing its price to surge by significantly more than 400 percent before falling sharply.

Despite his prior admission that his comments were jokes, Musk’s tweets were enough to cause Dogecoin to spike above 5 cents, before it fell back Friday to trade at 4.519 cents at 18:30 GMT, under website CoinMarketCap.

Dogecoin’s market capitalization is 5.8 billion dollars at this price, placing it 15th in the cryptocurrency league table.

“Anything Musk tweets about shoots higher because he has such a strong following both on social networking and as a businessman,” said Neil Wilson, an analyst for Markets.com.

Last month Musk’s messages helped spur a short boom in the more significant known cryptocurrency bitcoin.

Founded in 2013 by a pair of software workers, Dogecoin’s creators have said it was intended as an ironic reaction to two significant Internet phenomena that year.

These were cryptocurrencies, which had multiplied in the wake of bitcoin, and montages of a Shiba Inu dog image.

“From ‘that may seem like it’s funny’to doing it took about three hours,” Billy Markus, a movie game-obsessed software engineer at IBM, told the news website CNET.

“It’s almost trivial to make a new cryptocurrency.”

However, Reddit forum users began using Dogecoin to welcome comments from posters because of its previously low prices.

After briefly climbing above a cent in 2017 — when market interest was boosting cryptocurrencies — the price of Dogecoin had subsided.

It crossed the one-cent threshold at the beginning of the year and has been on the rise ever since.