Everything you need to know about Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency

Dogecoin, a digital coin originally created as a joke, has soared as much as 80 per cent and saw an exponential increase in trading volume by over 800 per cent. The surge in Dogecoin has got the attention of billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who on Thursday tweeted a picture of a magazine cover of “Dogue”, a play on the popular magazine fashion title “Vogue.” This was interpreted by Twitter and Reddit users as Musk supporting the cryptocurrency.

But this isn't the first time Musk caused a Dogecoin spike with one of his tweets. A July tweet with a "doge" mean sent the crypto up by 20%.

Here’s everything you need to know about Dogecoin:

1. Dogecoin was created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013 as a joke. The logo of dogecoin is a Shiba Inu which is based on the popular “doge” meme of 2013.

2. Dogecoin hit $0.0138 on January 28. This happened days after the Gamestop frenzy on Reddit that caused Gamestop’s share to soar by nearly 2,000 per cent, since the beginning of 2021.

3. Dogecoin witnessed a resurgence because of Reddit and a tweet from the chairman of WallStreetBets who wrote on Twitter on Thursday, "Has Doge ever been to a dollar?" WallStreetBets was behind the surge in GameStop which created pain for hedge funds that are shorting or betting against the stock.

4. Hours after the tweet, millions of people joined the subreddit Satoshi Street Bets and wrote about "taking doge to the moon," which encouraged users to not sell the Dogecoin till its value reaches a dollar. One of the early posts on SatoshiStreetBets read: “Let’s make DOGECOIN a thing. That’s it, that’s the post.”

5. The subreddit r/SatoshiStreetBets calls itself as the crypto version of WallStreetBets. Satoshi is the name of the mysterious founder, or group of people, who developed bitcoin

6. At 12.03pm Singapore time, Dogecoin had added about $7.17 billion to its market capitalisation in 24 hours and its total market cap stood at $8.2 billion, making it the ninth-largest cryptocurrency.

7. Such activity in the cryptocurrency space is not new. In 2018, the US commodity futures trading commission (CFTC) has sounded the alarm about the same.

(With agency inputs)