The digital asset market may be generally sleepy today, but one cryptocurrency is on the rise: Dogecoin.
DOGE was at the time of writing up more than 9% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, trading at $0.08. And in the past week, it has risen 19%, making it one of the best performing coins.
The original meme coin rose in price after Twitter CEO – and the world’s richest man – Elon Musk posted a promotion of the social media site’s new logo, originally shared by a Dogecoin designer. Musk also appears to have added the Dogecoin symbol to the location field in his Twitter bio.
Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joke. But it is now the eighth largest digital asset with a market cap of $11.2 billion. It was finally revealed that Musk has been advising the developers behind Dogecoin since 2019.
Musk started pumping up currency on Twitter in 2020 by posting memes, and it in turn grew in value and gained a cult following. His electric car company Tesla also accepts cryptocurrency. Tesla has never disclosed whether any customers used Dogecoin or, if so, how much was received. But Musk’s affinity for meme currency has drawn some negative attention.
In June 2022, a group of Dogecoin investors filed a $258 billion class action lawsuit against Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX. The lawsuit alleges he was part of a blackmail scheme to pump up the cryptocurrency. Last month, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that also accuses Tesla’s CEO of insider trading.
Rumors have been circulating for some time that Dogecoin could be integrated into the social media platform as a form of payment. And in January, news broke that the company was working on a product in a way that was supportive of crypto payments.
Musk took the helm of Twitter in October 2022. Since then, he has fired many staff, brought back controversial former banned users and, most recently, rebranded the company to X.com.
Musk and billionaire investor Mark Cuban have previously said that Dogecoin could one day be used as a serious payment cryptocurrency.
And Dogecoin developers showed exclusively decode in 2021, they had been working with Musk for years to make the cryptocurrency a cheaper and greener alternative to Bitcoin.
