The year in Dogecoin: Elon Musk’s favorite crypto makes a comeback

With crypto flying high in 2024, Dogecoin holders are determined to take their multi-million dollar coin to the moon.

And if recent events are any indication, the coin – often showered with attention by billionaire Elon Musk – has already come a long way.

Dogecoin has had a knockout year, since hitting a three-year high price, becoming the namesake of a U.S. extra-governmental initiative, and even inspiring new exchange-traded products.

Although its network has encountered some technical issues recently, the Shiba Inu-inspired token is still heading into the new year with plenty of momentum.

Here’s a look back at Dogecoin in 2024.

Musk and Trump drive DOGE

Dogecoin climbed to a a three-year high from $0.48 in early December as President-elect Donald Trump and his ally Musk fueled positive investor sentiments toward digital assets.

The digital currency peaked at an all-time high of $0.73 in May 2021 and spent the following years well below that level until its recent resurgence.

The price of Dogecoin began to rise a few months ago as so-called crypto champion Trump led the way in taking back the White House. His victory on Election Day sparked broader enthusiasm in the crypto market that benefited meme coins including Dogecoin.

The token also rallied several times after Musk, in a series of posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), referenced the digital currency alongside a government agency project to reduce bureaucratic expenses.

Musk and Ramaswamy will lead DOGE

Shortly after Election Day, Trump announced that Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would lead an extra-governmental US department that shares a name with Dogecoin.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, aims to reduce the U.S. government spendingreducing the federal budget deficit. Musk teased the initiative for weeks before its official announcement, much to the delight of Dogecoin holders.

“We will also have a ranking of the stupidest spending your tax dollars,” Musk said in November on X. “It will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.”

The price of Dogecoin also increased after Musk shared his plans for the initiative during a press conference. Trump rally in October. Although DOGE is apparently named after Musk’s beloved coin – its acronym matches Dogecoin’s ticker, and Trump is selling t-shirts featuring him and Musk alongside a Shiba Inu dog – the initiative it -even has nothing to do with cryptography.

Dogecoin is experiencing technical issues

Dogecoin encountered an unexpected problem earlier this month when a blockchain builder reportedly crashed around 70% of the network’s public nodes.

Andreas Kohl alleged in an X article on December 11, he removed hundreds of public nodes that allegedly supported the Dogecoin network. He said he exploited a “Death Note” bug in the blockchain code using an old laptop in El Salvador.

A “death note” bug allows an individual to cause a node to die due to a segmentation fault, according to software engineer Tobias Ruck, who helped identify the vulnerability.

However, the Dogecoin Foundation later claimed that Kohl’s claim was false, arguing that more than 1,000 Dogecoin nodes were unaffected during the alleged attack. The Foundation also noted that the network resisted the takedown attempt.

Yet the competing claims have ignited a firestorm within the Dogecoin community. Some community members argued that the bug exposed major security flaws in the network.

“Anyone could crash the entire Dogecoin network in an instant,” Kohl said in an article. However, the Dogecoin Foundation pushed back on these concerns.

Timothy Stebbing, Director of the Dogecoin Foundation, said Decrypt that the bug is not as bad as it seems. It was patched in early December and node operators gradually updated their devices to protect them from this vulnerability, Stebbing said.

According to Stebbing, the blockchain also has many private nodes, making them more difficult to identify and remove than public nodes that could have been affected by the alleged attack.

Dogecoin ETF – yes, really

With stain Bitcoin And Ethereum exchange-traded funds gained approval in the United States earlier this year, it’s possible ETFs based on Dogecoin could one day become available to investors in the United States as well, analysts said. Decrypt.

“The ETF industry is notorious for throwing spaghetti at the wall,” said Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg ETF. Decrypt in November. “I imagine we’ll see all sorts of things attempted, including DOGE.”

Whether these ETFs will be approved within the next year remains to be seen, but some issuers are already considering offering funds backed by the Shiba Inu-inspired token. According to a blog post published last October, Grayscale is already considering including Dogecoin in its future exchange-traded products.

Valour, a subsidiary of Canadian crypto company DeFi Technologies, revealed the Valor Dogecoin (DOGE) SEK ETP in Sweden last November, marking the first exchange-traded product in the region offering exposure to meme-inspired crypto.

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Edited by Sébastien Sinclair