Dogecoin value surges following Musk intervention

() boss Elon Musk was once again demonstrating the market moving power of his Twitter account on Thursday after several Tweets touting apparent support for the obscure cryptocurrency Dogecoin caused the value of the digital token to spike in morning trading.

Early on Thursday morning GMT, Musk tweeted a meme of himself holding a symbol of the coin aloft captioned “ur welcome”, this was followed by more tweets proclaiming Dogecoin as “the people’s crypto” and that there were “no highs, no lows, only Doge”.

ur welcome pic.twitter.com/e2KF57KLxb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2021

Despite no tangible news aside from Musk’s tweets, the price of Dogecoin was up 59.5% over a 24 hour period in late-morning trading at a whopping US$0.053, although this was down from an all-time high of US$0.058 reached earlier in the morning.

More importantly, Musk’s intervention means the market cap of what many originally considered to be a joke cryptocurrency is now worth around US$6.7bn.

Dogecoin was created in 20913 by two software engineers and is based on the Shiba Inu dog featured in the popular “Doge” internet meme. While the coin was designed to be a payment system that reached a broader demographic and also a way to distance crypto from other controversial tokens such as Bitcoin, it has largely remained outside of the mainstream until Musk’s appeal to the crypto.

However, Dogecoin isn’t the first crypto to garner praise from Musk, who has previously supported the more mainstream crypto Bitcoin.

“Anything Musk tweets about shoots higher because he has such a strong following both on social media and as a businessman. People will literally invest in him and his ideas, and don’t care what the fundamentals are about what’s involved”, said Neil Wilson at Markets.com.