On Wednesday (February 10), Elon Musk, the world’s second richest person (according to the Forbes’ “The Real-Time Billionaires List“), continued his support for popular meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE).
Dogecoin 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, who is a co-founder of PayPal, founder and CEO of SpaceX, and a co-founder and CEO of Tesla, has been voicing his affection for Dogecoin since April 2019 when he called it possibly his favorite cryptocurrency.
However, in the past several weeks, the Tesla CEO has taken his pumping of Dogecoin to a whole new level by regularly talking and tweeting about DOGE. Another thing that has helped Dogecoin achieve such huge gains this year is the pumping by enthusiasts on Reddit and Twitter who appreciate its fun nature and affordability.
According to data by TradingView, on February 7, the DOGE price reached — on crypto exchange Bittrex — $0.8614, setting a new all-time high.
Currently (as of 09:23 UTC on February 10), the Dogecoin price is $0.0739, up 4.37% vs USD in the past 24-hour period. Dogecoin’s market cap is around $9.25 billion, which makes Dogecoin 11th most valuable cryptoasset (by market cap). Dogecoin started 2021 at $0.00472, which means that in the year-to-date period, it’s price has gone up an incredible 1465% vs USD.
One of Musk’s most recent endorsements of Dogecoin took place over the weekend during an interview on TMZ:
Well, yesterday Musk took to Twitter once again to talk about Dogecoin, this time revealing that he has bought it for his son:
On January 31, Musk talked about his DOGE-related tweets during an interview on audio-based social network Clubhouse:
“They are really just meant to be jokes, but you know Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies obviously, but fate loves irony and often as a friend of mine says that the most ironic outcome or I’d say the most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of earth in the future.“
Although there are those who think that the large amount of attention that Dogecoin is getting could be bad because it might trivialise the whole crypto space/community, billionaire investor Mark Cuban does not appear to be one of them.
On Monday (February 8), Cuban, who is the majority owner of the professional basketball team Dallas Mavericks, as well as one of the “sharks” on the highly popular reality show “Shark Tank” (which is aired on the ABC television network), revealed what he had said when a Forbes reported had recently asked him about Dogecoin and whether its popularity with retail investors is a bad thing.
Dogecoin current huge level of popularity has not gone unnoticed by developers. According to Github, the last update to Dogecoin Core software was on 8 November 2019. However, a report by Coindek says that Dogecoin lead maintainer, Ross Nicoll, and four other Dogecoin developers have recently started the work of dealing with Dogecoin’s “scaling problems” and updating the software to “catch up” with the seven major releases the Bitcoin Core team has made since Dogecoin development came to a halt.
Nicoll told CoinDesk:
“People say it’s a joke coin but we’re very careful to take care of the code. When it took off, there was a resurgence in attention and we want to keep the currency operational.“
And Dogecoin developer Maximilian Keller told CoinDesk that the reason that Dogecoin needs to mirror the changes made to Bitcoin is that since 2014 Dogecoin Core “has always been based on Bitcoin”
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
