Popular meme altcoin Dogecoin, which was first introduced back in 2013 by a couple of engineers from IBM and Adobe, secures the spot as one of the top 20 largest cryptocurrencies with an $11 billion market cap as the coins’ value rose above the $0.10 level.
Dogecoin was currently trading at $0.1251 late Wednesday based on CoinMarketCap’s charts. The altcoin peaked at $0.1425 per unit when the Asian markets opened earlier in the day.
DOGE has created a buzz around the internet for a few months now, and a lot of analysts are pitching in their projections and forecasts for the coin. But what exactly made DOGE so popular?
Doge spikes in value
While the coin has been around since 2013, it wasn’t until earlier this year that Dogecoin saw a significant spike in its value. In fact, it hovered around $0.003 for most of 2020.
However, sometime between January 28 and 29 this year, Dogecoin’s value rose to 0.0235, a spike of more than 200% in just a day. This significant uptick was attributed to Elon Musk, Tesla CEO after he tweeted “Doge.”
The single tweet from Musk sparked a chain reaction that made Dogecoin become the talked-about altcoin in the crypto market. So it’s not necessarily the value that drives the buzz around Doge but its growth rate that exceeds even that of Bitcoin.
Is 2021 the Meme Year?
Dogecoin, which has the Shiba Inu canine as its official mascot and has been incorporated into the logo, was primarily intended by its creators Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer to be a “joke” and instant payment system that does away with the shackles of conventional banking. Markus and Palmer describe it as an open-source, peer-to-peer digital currency.
“It’s funny when you think about the fact that Dogecoin was initially created as a joke based on a meme,” DeFi co-founder and CEO Julian Hosp commented in an interview.
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