The digital asset market may be on the whole sleepy today, but one cryptocurrency is surging: Dogecoin.
DOGE was at the time of writing up more than 9% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, trading for $0.08. And in the past week, it's up 19%, making it one of the best-performing coins.
The original meme coin shot up in price as Twitter CEO—and the world's richest man—Elon Musk tweeted a promo of the social media site's new logo, originally shared by a Dogecoin designer. Musk appears to have also added the Dogecoin symbol to the location field in his Twitter bio.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2023
Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joke. But it is now the eighth biggest digital asset with a market cap of $11.2 billion. It was eventually revealed that Musk has been advising the developers behind Dogecoin since 2019.
Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020 by posting memes, and it in turn shot up in value and gained a cult following. His electric car company Tesla also accepts the cryptocurrency. Tesla has never revealed whether any customers have used Dogecoin or, if they have, how much it's received. But Musk's affinity for the meme coin has garnered some negative attention.
In June 2022, a group of Dogecoin investors filed a $258 billion class action lawsuit against Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX. The suit alleges he's been part of a racketeering scheme to pump the cryptocurrency. Last month, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that also accuses the Tesla CEO of insider trading.
Rumors have been circulating for some time now that Dogecoin could be integrated into the social media platform as a form of payment. And in January, news dropped that the company was working on a product in a way that was supportive of crypto payments.
Musk took over Twitter in October 2022. Since then, he has since fired a lot of staff, brought back former banned controversial users and, most recently, rebranded the company to X.com.
Musk and fellow billionaire investor Mark Cuban have previously said that Dogecoin could be used one day as a serious cryptocurrency for payments.
And Dogecoin developers exclusively told Decrypt in 2021 that they had been working with Musk for years to make the cryptocurrency a cheaper, greener alternative to Bitcoin.