Elon Musk’s Dogecoin tweets make you think they’re barking for more

Dogecoin is named after an Internet meme that appeared almost a decade ago. The meme focused on the image of a Shiba Inu dog with bad spelling habits (hence, doge instead of dog). Users go Photoshop with the hairy face of the dog on everything from astronauts to Twinkies.

In 2013, software developer Billy Markus was watching Bitcoin gain popularity and decided to make his own cheerful cryptocurrency. He first based it on the video game “Animal Crossing” and called it bells, dubbed the game’s currency simulation.

People online hated it, he said. So when another developer, Jackson Palmer, shared a new idea for a cryptocurrency based on the doge meme, Mr. Markus reconfigured his code to fit the bells into the meme.

It was proposed to create a currency so ridiculous that it could never be taken seriously. In exchange for solving mathematical puzzles, dogecoin miners operating fast-moving equipment received from a dogecoin to hundreds of thousands of dogecoins.

The currency had a fleeting moment of fame when it began. In 2014, his online followers helped fund the Jamaican bobsled team’s trip to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and sent a Nascar dogecoin runner to the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Like most memes, it faded from its relevance.

Then came Mr. Musk. On January 28th tweeted a fake cover of “Dogue” magazine.

Dogecoin emerged as a topic on WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that incubated commerce on GameStop Corp.

In late January, the price of dogecoin rose 8 cents from half a penny, where it had traded earlier this month.

The billionaire head of Tesla tweeted about it again on Thursday, breaking what he said would be a parenthesis of the social media platform. “No highs, no lows, just Doge,” he posted. Dogecoin immediately shot 80% intraday, before stopping gains.

The Dogecoin network, maintained by volunteers, struggled to accommodate the influx of buyers. Volunteers got real money (in euros) to buy more space on the server.

Mr. Markus, who no longer works with dogecoin, could not believe that the code he wrote in three hours on Sunday resulted in a cryptocurrency worth thousands of dollars in total market value.

“The idea that dogecoin is worth 8 cents is the same as GameStop is worth $ 325,” said Markus, 38. “Does not make sense. It’s super absurd. The design of the coin was absurd.

Users can purchase dogecoin with a credit card in cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms, including Robinhood Markets Inc.

Damian Wawrzyniak, a chef at a restaurant in Peterborough, England, hadn’t heard of dogecoin before Mr. Musk tweeted about it. He quickly got a little through a cryptocurrency brokerage account that he has used during the closing of Covid-19.

Dogecoin is “a completely weird name,” he said, but he thought Mr. Musk, who has about 45 million Twitter followers, added to his appeal.

In late January, a small cohort of protesters gathered in front of Robinhood headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to protest the restrictions the broker had imposed on trading at GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings. Inc.

and other popular companies on Reddit.

As Dave Jevans, the chief executive of cryptocurrency firm CipherTrace, walked to the grocery store, a woman approached him and encouraged him to join.

“The market is manipulated,” he said.

“Buy bitcoin,” he joked.

“No, no, no,” she replied excitedly. “Buy dogecoin! Have you seen it? I think we can get a dollar. “

A vocal group of Reddit shoppers has turned their mantra into boosting dogecoin to $ 1. Twitter account TikTok Investors posted a video of a woman in purple workout clothes sing about bringing dogecoin “to the moon”.

In theory, it will be difficult for dogecoin to reach $ 1. Unlike bitcoin, which limits the number that can be extracted to 21 million, dogecoin does not have this limit. The rise of GameStop, however, has reminded investors that anything is possible.

The new fervor for cryptocurrency has even found converts who once despised dogecoin. Angelicah Shaver, a 28-year-old graduate student who runs a cryptocurrency-focused YouTube channel, said in a tweet in early January “Literally an insult to the tech community” since its creation.

But as the hype grew, he decided to use it as an opportunity to teach cryptocurrency novices how to buy, sell, and analyze coins. It bought $ 1,000 in dogecoin during the last week of January, just before its price rose, and maintains its position.

“Fate likes irony and it’s so true,” he said. “I have spoken against dogecoin so many times. Literally, I said that dogecoin is an insult to technology and that I now have this doge bag ”.

Write to Caitlin Ostroff to [email protected] and Paul Vigna to [email protected]