After a two day hiatus from Twitter, Elon Musk came back to promote Dogecoin, a meme-inspired cryptocurrency that no one was supposed to take seriously.
The cryptocurrency was invented by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer after Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, caught wind. They wanted to create a peer-to-peer currency that could reach more people than Bitcoin could. In the first 30 days after its release on December 6, 2013, over a million people had already visited Dogecoin.com.
What Is Dogecoin?
The currency was initially just supposed to be a parody of the thousands of other cryptocurrencies that sprung up after Bitcoin – traded between people on the internet for a few laughs. However, the Dogecoin community has actually been able to fundraise for numerous charities and initiatives — raising $36,000 in just two days for the Jamaican Bobsled Team to go to the Sochi Winter Olympics, sponsoring the NASCAR driver Josh Wise in 2014 with about $55,00, and raising $30,000 for World Water Day the same year to build a well in the Tana river basin of Kenya.
The wide-eyed Shibu Inu that takes the spotlight on Dogecoin came from the popular internet meme of a Shiba Inu with a multicolored, comic sans, broken English internal dialogue. Online polls and numerous media outlets have acknowledged Doge as the best Internet meme from the 2010’s. Doge has been mentioned by US Congress members, Delta Airlines’ Safety videos, and the star of a Google Easter egg. Several spin-offs have been created since the original meme’s debut – re-sparking the meme and keeping the meme popular nearly 8 years later.
The cryptocurrency shot up over 800% in value on January 28th, 2021 as a result of Reddit’s WallStreetBets, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweets, and various other celebrities and prominent figures supporting the meme-currency. After Musk’s tweets about Dogecoin, trading shot up to over 50% overnight and has even been named “Dogecoin CEO” which he happily embraces in his Twitter Bio.
Today, Elon Musk even sent out a Twitter poll about if “the future currency of Earth” would be Dogecoin or “all other crypto combined”. And guess what? Dogecoin won.
A TikTok campaign has even sprung up with hopes of raising the value of Dogecoin to $1, which investors say will help establish Dogecoin as an actual cryptocurrency and be taken more seriously.
In a tweet last Tuesday, even billionaire investor Mark Cuban said that “If I had to choose between buying a lottery ticket and #Dogecoin … I would buy #Dogecoin”.
Chances are that the price of Dogecoin also likely went up as a result of a new wave of companies looking towards using decentralized finance or a form of finance that doesn’t require intermediaries like exchanges, brokerages, and banks.
Elon Musk has since gone back and said that his tweets were meant as a joke and has historically said that he’s dubious of cryptocurrencies.
Market analysts say that Dogecoin might not be the most worthwhile investment; oftentimes, these sorts of high-return, short-term, investment-type trends don’t hold up for long enough to generate true value. But, that isn’t stopping people all over the world from continuing to raise prices and invest in Dogecoin.
Who knows? Maybe Dogecoin will become the next Bitcoin.
Just like how Cryptocurrency might just be the future of money, AI might be the future of tech.