Dogecoin was soaring again on Wednesday morning, surging 20 percent as the cryptocurrency continued to gain from speculative trading.
The electronic coin predicated on a Shiba Inu meme was trading at approximately 67 cents, up about 21% for the day. It broke above 50 cents per share for the very first time on Tuesday.
This week’s explosion comes before Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s planned appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Musk is a fan of Dogecoin, and the potential for him to talk about the money on national television may be driving demand.
Dogecoin was launched as a joke in 2013, at a time once the cryptocurrency boom was in its infancy and there was a flood of small, primitive coins going into the marketplace. Doge has regained popularity, seemingly boosted by focus from billionaires like Musk and Mark Cuban and effortless accessibility through free-trading app Robinhood.
“I worry that, once the enthusiasm rolls out, there’s no developers on it, there’s no institutions coming in. But it’s got this moniker of the people’s coin right now,” Galaxy Digital’s Michael Novogratz said on “Squawk Box.”
“When you think about the whole theory of what this crypto revolution is, there’s something pure about what Dogecoin’s done,” Novogratz said. “It’s a little bit of a middle finger to the system.”
Crypto firm Coinbase lists Dogecoin with a market cap of $87 billion, based on a very simple multiplication of price and generated coins. That is greater, on paper, compared to publicly traded Coinbase’s market cap of roughly $56 billion.
The explosion in Dogecoin did not seem to be spilling over into the larger cryptocurrencies. The purchase price of bitcoin was up slightly in morning trading, while ether dropped 4 percent.
As of this writing, Dogecoin is ranked the fourth largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $84.08 billion. The bulk of the gains have come over the past month. Right around mid-April 2021, Dogecoin began its parabolic move from just under 10 cents to its current price of just under 70 cents.
