Will Elon Musk celebrate the 11thth dogecoin’s birthday on Friday, December 6, with an enthusiastic message on X, the social media platform it has owned since 2022? If he does, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX could well trigger a new rise in the price of this cryptocurrency, which Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election on November 5 has propelled to a total capitalization of more than 66 billion dollars.
Today one of the top 10 cryptoassets in the world, even if it is still far from the 2,000 billion dollars of bitcoin, dogecoin had few advantages to offer when it was created in 2013. At the time, its creators, Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a marketing specialist at Adobe, had no other ambition than to parody cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular, while promoting “a currency for the people” and easy to use.
This simplicity would become one of the strong points of dogecoin, renowned for the ease and speed of transactions, which would make it a popular instrument for rewarding producers of online content, especially since transaction fees are lower than those bitcoin.
For Markus and Palmer, technological innovation is not their priority; on the contrary, they take care of the image of dogecoin, adopting as a symbol the female shiba inu Kabosu, whose photo, crossed front legs and expressive mouth, posted online by its Japanese owner, gave rise to multiple reappropriations on the internet – memes.
Elon Musk’s support
In the first years, dogecoin was content with its status as a memecoin, an object of amusement for a still underdeveloped crypto community, and its financial performance remained modest. The founders themselves quickly left the company: Markus in 2014 and Palmer in 2015.
But in 2019, the situation changed. Musk, who co-founded payment processor PayPal before taking the helm at Tesla, had long been interested in cryptocurrencies, but this year he took up the cause of dogecoin, writing on Twitter that It could be his “favorite cryptocurrency”.
This was the start of a long series of supportive statements, favorable comments – and references to the shiba inu – with a marked impact on the price: in 2022, German economist Lennart Ante calculated that a favorable tweet from Musk resulted in an average price increase of 6.33%. the price of dogecoin within an hour of its publication.
However, Musk’s love affair with dogecoin has not been without its hiccups: May 8, 2021, as a guest on the NBC comedy show Saturday evening livethe billionaire, decked out in a bow tie and thick glasses, played the role of a fake financial expert in a sketch mocking the crypto craze. When asked about dogecoin, he replied that “it’s a scam”; the price of dogecoin fell by almost 40% in a few hours.
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