Meme-tastic Cryptocurrency, Dogecoin Replaces GameStop as Reddit's Latest Viral Wall Street Troll
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Carly Tennes
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- January 29, 2021
The GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry stock booms have slowed, yet it seems Reddit's market stronghold is still far from over. As several investment platforms, including the AOC, Ted Cruz, and Davey Daytrader-despised Robinhood halt trades of Reddit's meme-y retail picks, another crowdsourced stock has arisen from the ashes of its mostly brick-and-mortar predecessors, absolutely decimating the digital market -- none other than Dogecoin. Yep, a cryptocurrency designed after the internet's favorite confused-looking Shiba Inu, has become the social news site's latest trade du jour, skyrocketing more than 370 percent, up to a peak of 613 percent, over the past day, CNN reported. Such stonks. Very currency. Such profits.
Dogecoin, like many of the popular Reddit-backed financial moves over the past week, was founded in late 2013 as a joke between software engineers, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who were respectively working respectively at IBM and Adobe, according to Business Insider. Approximately seven years ago, Palmer "jokingly" posted a tweet about creating a meme-tastic currency, pulling from the popular internet image and Bitcoin's recent boom, in which its price jumped from $150 to $1,000. "Investing in Dogecoin, pretty sure it's the next big thing," he wrote. Like many doge-related posts on the internet, his sarcastic quip quickly garnered attention online, where users on several social platforms -- Reddit included -- encouraged Palmer to take his off-handed post to the next level, turning it into an actual cryptocurrency. Inspired, Palmer purchased Dogecoin.com. Amid the money meme's development, Markus, who had been working on creating a more accessible cryptocurrency of his own, stumbled upon the website shortly after it was posted.
"The first thing I said was, 'This is so funny.' Then I said, 'I should just make this coin,'" Markus told the business publication at the time. Although he reached out to Palmer, Markus says he was so excited about the concept of a meme-based coin, he began re-designing parts of Bitcoin's code to look like the beloved confused Shiba even before his future business partner replied to his DM. Of course, Palmer eventually responded and Dogecoin went live in December 2013, just months after the initial tweet, hitting several peaks over the course of its nearly decade-long existence. This success was partially due to its loyal base of Reddit supporters, who helped it "instantly" explode, a phenomenon which according to Business Insider may be a testament to the crypto's relatively low barrier of entry, as compared to Bitcoin, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars for one single unit of currency.
"When I jokingly tweeted about 'investing in Dogecoin' in late 2013, I never imagined that the tongue-in-cheek cryptocurrency I had just brought into the world would still be around in the year 2018, let alone hit a $2 billion market cap like it just did over the weekend," Palmer wrote in an essay for Vice a little more than three years ago. Yet over the past day and change, Dogecoin's market cap has soared by approximately fourfold, hitting $8.2 billion, making it the world's ninth-largest cryptocurrency, CNBC reported.
So, how, exactly did Dogecoin go from a Twitter joke to a crypto-giant? The answer, of course, is the fine folks of Reddit. Facing new roadblocks from companies like Robinhood and Interactive Brokers, according to The Motley Fool, who have halted trading on several of their suggested stocks, some users on subreddits including r/WallStreetBets have turned their sights on the digital currency, specifically Dogecoin.
"With all this going on does anyone want to try to kick off a Dogecoin Rally??????" asked user u/lomac2w0 in a post that has garnered more than 7.3 thousand upvotes and approximately 100 awards. "It's really cheap and wouldn't be that hard to do." Several users quickly expressed their interest in the concept of boosting the cryptocurrency.
"To the moon," responded u/keylight. "Keep it pumping fellas until 1$," added u/colmandate. "Dude if this reaches $1 ill be able to retire," u/StateOHockey replied. Although Dogecoin currently stands at approximately $0.0469 per share, according to CNN, its current price is a vast improvement to its initial trading price of $0.000232 back in 2013, CNBC noted in their coverage. However the users of r/WallStreetBets aren't the only netizens getting in on the historic deal -- several other Reddit boards have promoted the stock, including r/SatoshiStreetBets and r/CryptoCurrency, where the deal was discussed on a now-deleted thread entitled "Dogecoin is the next GME/Bitcoin."
So folks, to paraphrase the old adage, if you read about a stock in the paper, it's too late -- yet if you read about it early enough on Reddit, you may get the deal of the lifetime. Happy investing, folks!
For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram at @HuntressThompson_, on Twitch.tv @HuntressThompson_ on Twitter @TennesAnyone.
