Doge, the digital joke worth nearly 70 billion USD, was created in 2013 as a joke. The price of Dogecoin surged thanks to Elon Musk and escalated when his administration saw leaders who favored cryptocurrency.
Over the past 12 months, the price of Dogecoin has increased by more than 380%, trading around 0.47 USD as of noon on December 8.
With this development, Dogecoin's market capitalization expanded by approximately 520%, currently around 69 billion USD. Although it still lags far behind Bitcoin (with a market cap of nearly 2,000 billion USD), it currently ranks 7th among the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies in the world.
This is a significant step up from its low starting point. In 2013, Billy Markus - an engineer at IBM and Jackson Palmer - a marketing expert at Adobe, co-created Dogecoin with the initial goal of mocking the cryptocurrency market, particularly Bitcoin, promoting it as an easy-to-use currency for everyone.
This simplicity has become one of Dogecoin's strengths, known for its ease and speed of transactions. It has become a popular tool to reward online content creators, thanks to lower transaction fees than Bitcoin.
For Markus and Palmer, technological innovation was not Dogecoin's priority. Instead, they were concerned about the currency's iconic image, a Shiba Inu dog with its front paws crossed and an expressive mouth. Its name is Kabosu, posted online by its Japanese owner, and it became a widely reused symbol on the Internet, known as a meme.
The content continues below the advertisement. In the early years, Dogecoin was a "memecoin", a source of entertainment for a cryptocurrency community that was still developing, with modest financial performance.
The founders themselves quickly departed from the venture, with Markus leaving in 2014 and Palmer in 2015. But by 2019, the game had changed thanks to Elon Musk.
That year, the tech billionaire tweeted (now X) that it could be his "favorite cryptocurrency". Since then, every time Musk comments on Dogecoin, the currency benefits.
In 2022, German economist Lennart Ante calculated that a favorable tweet from Musk helped Dogecoin's price increase by an average of 6.33% within an hour after posting.
However, Musk's "affair" with Dogecoin is not all sweet. On May 8, 2021, as a guest on NBC's Saturday Night Live comedy show, the billionaire donned a bow tie and glasses to play a fake financial expert in a skit mocking the cryptocurrency frenzy.
When asked about Dogecoin, he replied that "it is a scam", causing the currency's price to plummet nearly 40% within a few hours. Musk's unintentional sarcasm created mixed feelings, according to Claire Balva, Vice President of the fintech company Deblock (France). "In the cryptocurrency community, many are trying to make this field more serious, more institutional, so they sometimes feel uncomfortable with Dogecoin because it mocks their very activity," she said.
However, she admitted that laughing at an internet joke is the investor's freedom.
After the election on November 5, President-elect Donald Trump appointed Musk to lead the Government Performance Council, abbreviated as DOGE.
The decision sparked an investment frenzy. In just three weeks, the value of Dogecoin tripled, and trading volume quadrupled to over 20 billion USD per day.
After a short period of stagnation, a new price surge emerged on December 4, following Trump's appointment of Paul Atkins, a strong supporter of cryptocurrency, to lead the Securities Commission.
This option benefits the entire market, pushing Bitcoin's price at one point above 100,000 USD. Dogecoin was popularized by Musk and reinforced by Trump's promises, with investors speculating that the world's richest billionaire would hold a prominent position in the new administration, so Dogecoin would benefit, according to Quentin Demé, a lecturer at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. "But it remains a cryptocurrency with very little intrinsic value.
There are no solid fundamental factors behind the development and growth," he commented. Currently, Elon Musk is still actively posting on the X platform to praise DOGE's future potential in combating bureaucracy, simplifying taxes, and reducing public spending, but he has been silent about Dogecoin for over a week.
According to Coin Market Cap, based on recent price trends and historical momentum, if Dogecoin maintains this breakout and the daily closing price remains above 0.45 USD, it is likely that the price could increase by 30% to reach 0.57 USD in the short term.
In addition to technical analysis, "whales" and large organizations have shown interest in Dogecoin, according to blockchain analytics companies like IntoTheBlock and Coinglass. Data from IntoTheBlock shows that the trading volume of this cryptocurrency increased by 42% in the 24 hours leading up to 9 PM on Saturday (December 7).
Additionally, exchanges have seen a capital outflow of Dogecoin worth 103.43 million USD. The signal of transferring assets from exchanges to personal wallets indicates that these investors believe in the long-term price increase, wanting to hold Dogecoin longer, reducing supply and selling pressure.