As virtually every cryptocurrency bleeds on Friday, of the top 10 biggest digital assets, Dogecoin has been hit the hardest: the meme coin is down 14.6% in 24 hours at the time of writing, trading for $0.069327, as per CoinGecko.
Dogecoin, which has a market cap of $9.2 billion, had been doing well. Only at the weekend it was one of the best performing altcoins, and touched $0.0838—20% higher than it is now.
Its brief surge was likely down to the release of Dogechain, a blockchain network that allows investors to use a wrapped version of the coin for NFTs, DeFi protocols, and dapps.
But the cryptocurrency—which trades as DOGE—has been battered today as the two largest coins, Bitcoin and Ethereum, nosedive and traders liquidate their positions.
Dogecoin was invented in 2013 as a joke; its creators wanted to poke fun at the world of Bitcoin. The coin, which runs on its own blockchain, is considered the first "meme coin"—the cryptocurrency is based on the popular Doge meme.
For most of its history, the coin had a relatively small following, but that changed when Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk started talking about it on Twitter and its price started to skyrocket in 2020.
At one point last year, its market cap stood at over $42 billion, which is higher than many companies on the S&P500.
Although now its value is a fraction of that, it is still the tenth-biggest cryptocurrency in existence, and has spawned hundreds of spinoffs.
The world of meme coins—tokens based on internet memes that often don't offer much utility beyond that—exploded in popularity within the last two years, largely thanks to Musk and his love for DOGE.
Another billionaire, entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban, has also given the “dog coin” love: the Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner declared the cryptocurrency could be good for making payments—and recently said it has more potential than smart-contract network Cardano.