Dogecoin Pumps 8% After Elon Musk Says He's Still Buying

By Decrypt Staff

As the current crypto rout continues, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down 30% over the past week and the entire crypto market cap fell to $830 billion. But Elon Musk declared he will "keep supporting Dogecoin."

That was enough to make DOGE spike 8% to $0.058.

Of course, 5.8 cents is a far cry (a 91% drop, to be exact) from the 72 cents Dogecoin touched in May of last year, when Musk hosted "Saturday Night Live" and Dogecoin got a mention in his opening monologue and on Weekend Update. ("It's a hustle," Musk responded to Michael Che's question about DOGE.)

Musk has been Dogecoin's most high-profile cheerleader since April 2019 when he tweeted, "Dogecoin may be my fav cryptocurrency." Throughout 2020 and 2021, Google searches for Dogecoin spiked every time Musk tweeted about the meme coin. In May 2021, Decrypt reported that Dogecoin developers had even been in close contact with Musk about changes he wanted made to the code.

Musk tweet on June 19 at 2:19 a.m. EST gave DOGE an immediate boost. (CoinMarketCap)

More recently, Musk (along with Mark Cuban) has advocated for the use of DOGE for payments, which would make the joke coin a real utility and less of a joke.

And in his recent bid to buy Twitter, Musk has repeatedly said one of the immediate features he'd implement is Dogecoin tipping (Twitter currently only supports tipping in Bitcoin) and the acceptance of DOGE as payment for premium services like Twitter Blue.

It's hard to see what would need to happen for DOGE to get back to 72 cents when it's sitting around a nickel, but if Musk keeps pumping it, anything is possible.

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