Has Dogecoin, Elon Musk’s ‘People’s Crypto’, Fizzled Out After Record Rally?

Dogecoin value is faltering after a record making rally where it hit new highs. Dogecoin's value was driven up with enthusiastic backing from people like Elon Musk, who helped drive the value of the light-hearted dog-themed cryptocurrency that was created as a meme, to an all-time high. The value of the cryptocurrency soared to $0.45 (approximately Rs 34) on April 16.

However, since then the cryptocurrency has been on a downslide. The crash began on April 21, a day after fans of Dogecoin celebrated ‘Doge Day'. Using hashtags such as DogeDay and DogeDay420, backers posted memes and messages on various social media platforms to fuel a rise in the cryptocurrency's value. On Friday, (at the time of writing), Dogecoin's price was just over Rs. 16.

The rise of Dogecoin has been heavily influenced by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets time and again have sent the price of the cryptocurrency soaring.

On April 15, Musk tweeted the photo of a 1926 painting ‘Dog Barking At The Moon' by a Spanish artist and changed the title of the artwork ‘Doge barking at the moon', referring to the cryptocurrency. That took the value of Dogecoin to all-time high. However, since it began crashing, Musk hasn't tweeted anything yet about the cryptocurrency.

In February, a series of tweets by Musk, hailing Dogecoin, took the value of the meme-based cryptocurrency to wild levels. He first tweeted a photo of a rocket reaching the moon, and followed it up with a one-word tweet: “Doge”.

Musk also posted his version of the iconic Lion King image of Rafiki holding a baby Simba over Pride Rock. He replaced the mandrill-shaman's face with his own while the lion cub's face was replaced with that the Dogecoin logo — the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu.

The business magnate did not stop at that. He put up two more posts on the cryptocurrency. “Dogecoin is the people's crypto,” he wrote and followed it up with a rather funny yet witty tweet: “No highs, no lows, only Doge”.

Apart from Musk, rapper Snoop Dogg and Kiss singer Gene Simmons, too, have backed Dogecoin.

In February, Snoop Dogg tweeted at Musk with a parody of one of his albums, with the ‘Snoop Doge'.

Simmons tweeted in February told his followers that he had “bought a big position in Dogecoin”. In another tweet, he just wrote “To the moon”, with an image of Musk pushing the cryptocurrency higher.

Dogecoin was the brainchild of techies Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who started it merely as a joke to sidestep traditional banking fees in 2013 when it was trading around $0.000232 (roughly Rs 0.017).