Earlier today (July 18), Elon Musk, who is a co-founder of PayPal, founder and CEO of SpaceX, and a co-founder and CEO of Tesla, ironically promoted meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE) once again. Although this appears to have slightly pumped the DOGE price, it is worth keeping in mind the advice offered recently by OKEx CEO about joining the FOMO game.

Elon Musk’s History of Talking About Crypto

Dogecoin, which was initially released on 6 December 2013, as a “fun and friendly internet currency.” It was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It is “a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency” that has as its mascot “Doge”, a Shiba Inu (a Japanese breed of dog).

Musk seems to be a fan of cryptocurrency, and has several times in the past talked about crypto in tweets and interviews.

For instance, in February 2019, during an interview on ARK Investment Management’s For Your Innovation (FYI) podcast, the host, Catherine Wood, who is the founder, CIO, and CEO of ARK, asked Musk if he agreed with Jack Dorsey that “there is going to be one native cryptocurrency when it comes to the internet” and that this cryptocurrency is Bitcoin.

Musk answered:

“It’s interesting. I have some friends of mine that are really involved in crypto. I mean, I think, the Bitcoin structure was quite brilliant. It seems that there is some merit to Ethereum as well, and maybe some of the others. But I am not sure that it would be a good use of Tesla resources to get involved in crypto… I mean, think, actually, one of the downsides of crypto is that computationally it’s like quite energy intensive.”

On 1 April 2019, the people behind the Twitter account of Dogecoin, created the following poll:

A day later, Musk found out about the results of this poll (which at the time had him 16% of the second place candidate), and he decided to send out the following tweet:

Later that day, the Dogecoin account sent out the following tweet to let their newest fan know that he was now Dogecoin’s (honorary) CEO:

Less than two hours later, Musk sent out this tweet to show how cool he thinks Dogecoin is:

TikTok’s Dogecoin Challenge 

It all started on July 2 when TikTok user @jamezg97 released a video titled “Let’s All Get Rich” in which he explained how people could get rich by investing just $25 in Dogecoin:

“Dogecoin is practically worthless. There are 800 million TikTok users. Invest just $25. Once the stock hits one dollar, you’ll have $10,000. Tell everyone you know.”

Since then, this video has gone viral: as of today, there are 74.2K likes and 60921 comments.

This “#DogecoinTiktokChallange”, which got widely noticed and discussed, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) led to the price of Dogecoin surging 113% (from $0.002333 to $0.00497) between July 6 and July 8.

2 Week DOGE-USD Chart on 18 July 2020.png

On July 8, the owner of the Dogecoin Twitter account issued this warning to investors and traders:

Justin Litchfield, who is the chief technology officer at crypto-focused investment firm ProChain Capital told Bloomberg:

“This has a strong history of having done this. The whole currency was started as a joke to make fun of the financial system, which is bizarre to think about.”

Elon Musk’s Latest Comments About Dogecoin

Earlier today, Musk tweeted:

This prompted Binance Co-Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) to reply to Musk with this tweet:

What OKEx CEO Jay Hao Has to Say About Trading Dogecoin

The Dogecoin Challenge helped DOGE to reach a 12-month price high on July 8, and this rally seems to have had a positive effect on the altcoin market, leading some observers to claim on July 8 that altcoin season had arrived.

On the following day, Jay Hao, who is the CEO of crypto exchange OKEx, published an article titled “s Dogecoin Really a Signal of ‘Altcoin Season’​? Good Time for Gains? Not Necessarily” on Linkedin.

In this article, the OKEx CEO made some interesting observations and offered some advice for those thinking of FOMOing into investing in Dogecoin:

“… if the people around you have begun to buy altcoins, altcoin season may have indeed already begun. But by the time everyone knows that altcoin season has begun, the round of bull market is likely to be over already. This is why people always say, ‘there are many people who make money in the bull market, but more people lose money.

“As the CEO of a leading crypto exchange, short-term high-volume trading benefits me, yet, I prefer to focus on long-term business and protect the interests of every investor. From the perspective of friends, then, I advise every user of OKEx to invest rationally and say that any investment under impulse may cause them to become the last receiver of the FOMO effect and potentially make a loss. 

“In this regard, I want to praise the Dogecoin team, as, despite the powerful fan-based marketing surrounding the project, they are still very rational when advising investors…

“For those traders who want to speculate on Dogecoin while heeding the warnings, DOGE is going live on OKEx spot margin trading and DOGE/USDT perpetual swap. I of course do not recommend impulsive investments, so if you want to join the FOMO game, please be sure to use derivatives sensibly to hedge risks.”

On July 10, OKEx announced: