End of the Musk pump? Dogecoin barely moves after Tesla joke

They say all good things come to an end, and the Elon Musk-inflicted Dogecoin pump is no stranger to that.

“Maybe if it sees a Shiba Inu, the car renders a Dogecoin,” said Musk in a reply to a tweet today, with the original post simply stating: “#TeslaVision can indeed see dogs!.”

Maybe if it sees a Shiba Inu, the car renders a Dogecoin …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2021

The prices, uncharacteristically, however, budged little. DOGE moved from $0.2008 to as much as $0.206 before slightly correcting. But the move was unlike how the market reacted to Musk’s Dogecoin tweets (as lately as a few months ago)—showcasing a general trend of such moves being priced out as they became commonplace.

The Dogecoin game

Musk, CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, space exploration firm SpaceX, and other tech-forward businesses, gained notoriety in crypto circles over the past year after incessantly shilling for a good part of late-2020 and early 2021.

The play was usually as follows: Musk oft-mentioned Dogecoin (as a meme, or sometimes as a feature), with DOGE pumping tens of percent in the minutes afterward. The first few such tweets sent DOGE roaring over 100%, eventually powering the token to a peak price of $0.70 (at a $86 billion market cap).

Whether or not Musk personally benefited from the moves is left to one’s imagination. But one thing is for sure: The tweets gradually lowered in their market impact over time, with initial fascination about Musk and DOGE (in crypto circles) slowly turning to a general sentiment of why do it?

The 100% gains slowly simmered down to 70%. Then 50%. Then 20% and then 10%. And they are now down to a small fraction of their initial effect.

As such, as one of the world’s richest men, Musk has little to gain from pumping Dogecoin. But memes and jokes apart, he does seem to show interest in the memecoin’s future prospects.

Earlier this month saw Musk extend his support to an upcoming update on Dogecoin, making fees even cheaper and transactions even faster on the network. He even positioned the memecoin ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the world’s biggest cryptocurrencies, in a separate tweet last week, calling out the latter’s (supposed) lack of scalability for everyday audiences.

But don’t despair if you’re looking for the Musk pump just yet. The play is still alive in other memecoins….as ‘Baby Doge’ holders recently found out.