Dogecoin Gets Double-Digit Black Friday Pump

While Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of the crypto market has barely budged on this Black Friday—but one digital asset is soaring: Dogecoin. 

The original meme coin, with a current market cap of $12.3 billion, is up 10.5% in 24 hours, trading hands for 9 cents, according to CoinGecko. That’s a far cry from DOGE’s all-time-high of 73 cents back in May 2021 when Dogecoin-pumper Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live.

In fact, Dogecoin, which was originally created as a joke but later became Elon Musk’s favorite digital asset, is the best performing major cryptocurrency in the past day. 

While Bitcoin, the largest digital asset by market cap, is down 0.5% over the past 24 hours; Ethereum has dipped by nearly 1%. 

The cryptomarket is still reeling after a brutal month: investor confidence has been shattered following news that FTX, once one of the biggest and most popular crypto exchanges, went bust. Nearly every major coin and token has experienced a sell-off this month as a result. 

It isn’t fully clear why Dogecoin is experiencing a Black Friday rally, apart from speculation on Crypto Twitter by an influencer about the blockchain’s future. 

Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joking tribute to the “doge” meme of a Shiba Inu dog that speaks in broken English.

But when Tesla CEO Elon Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020, it surged in value. Since then, Musk and the influential investor Mark Cuban have argued the coin has utility for payments. And DOGE developers even told Decrypt they were briefly working with Musk on improving the cryptocurrency. 

But it’s still down 91% from its peak.