Dogecoin is Worth 10 Cents. Is Elon Musk's Favorite Meme Cryptocurrency the Next Bitcoin?

It started as a joke, but now the joke appears to be on the people who didn’t take Dogecoin seriously. The meme-cryptocurrency Elon Musk wouldn’t stop tweeting about has reached an all-time high. According to Coindesk, it has risen to 70.22% in the last 24 hours – the highest ever recorded. Currently (at the time of writing this article) Dogecoin’s value is $0.122680, or almost 12 cents. The market cap of DogeCoin — which started as a joke and is literally classified as “a memecoin” — is currently over $14 billion. This is the highest-ever for the cryptocurrency, and the result of a semi-ironic movement that’s involved thousands of buyers, tens of thousands of online posters and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

In early January, each token was worth less than one cent. In late January, when both the GameStop and DogeCoin movements hit their stride, the value of DogeCoin shot up to 7.5 cents, well over a 10-magnification, before sliding down to 2.5 cents. The coin has spent the past few months in the three- to seven-cent range. On Sunday, its price began to rise, from around six cents, before it smashed the 10-cent milestone, reports CNET.

Crypto-Twitter is understandably excited.

Tesla CEO, SpaceX boss and currently world’s richest person, Elon Musk had announced that he “bought some Dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler holder.” Dogecoin surged as much as 16% following the tweet, spiking from $0.069 to $0.08.

The Shiba Inu-themed digital coin surpassed 8 cents for the first time, just a week after crashing to 2.5 cents and sparking an outcry on Reddit. It rose 53 per cent in the last 24 hours to 8.2 cents, breezing through its recent record of 7.8 cents posted in late January.

What is dogecoin? Dogecoin, much like Bitcoin, is a digital coin used for e-transactions. Doge is a reference to the ‘doge’ meme and has a picture of the shiba inu on it. It is a cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that, much like bitcoin, enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network.

Since its creation, Doge has also been used to donate money to charities. These have included the 2014 Jamaican Bobsled team who couldn’t afford to get to the Sochi Winter Olympics, a Nascar driver named Josh Wise, and a clean water project in Kenya called Doge4Water.

At the peak of the meme’s popularity in 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer, made a joke combining two of the internet’s most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge. He bought the Dogecoin.com domain and uploaded a photoshopped Shibe on a coin.

“If you want to make Dogecoin a reality, get in touch,” said the website. On the other side of the world, Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM, got in touch and set Dogecoin live. Dogecoin soared up by more than 60 per cent over the last 24 hours and experienced a 1,421 per cent increase in trading volume according to crypto data firm CoinMarketCap.

The peak price of Dogecoin in 2018 was around two cents, right before it crashed along with the rest of cryptocurrency. Reports suggest that by early 2019, Dogecoin had lost nearly 90 per cent of its value and was trading for a fraction of a penny, until now.

Has the reckoning for the crypto-currency world finally arrived in the form of a dog-themed token that started as a joke?

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