Dogecoin pumps 200% to become 5th largest crypto, and no one knows why

Meme currency Dogecoin (DOGE) is probably a joke no longer, if today’s price run and market cap is anything to consider.

The meme coin doubled its value in a single day in a price surge that left nearly everyone surprised. It trades over $0.35 at press time, reached a high of $0.45 earlier today, and breached into becoming the fifth-largest cryptocurrency with a hefty market cap of $53 billion.

Doge Barking at the Moon pic.twitter.com/QFB81D7zOL

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2021

Dogecoin is intrinsically valueless and is intended to have absolutely no use, save the memes and jokes. Co-creator Jackson Palmer launched the currency as an alternative to Bitcoin that could reach a broader demographic, with its 1-minute block intervals made it much faster than other blockchains at the time.

But the coin has since ended up seeing unprecedented success in the past few years, catching the attention of retail investors and mainstream news outlets worldwide and even billionaires like Mark Cuban of ‘Shark Tank’ fame and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

To kinda quote a movie “Doge keeps going up, but our pricing at https://t.co/F0mbQjy21C stays the same”. We just set a 24 hour record for Merch Sales in Doge ! 🚀🚀🚀 Put that Doge to work ! https://t.co/F0mbQjy21C https://t.co/JmZfOpkPgH

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) April 16, 2021

DOGE’s face-melting pump

DOGE netted over 19,676.6% to investors in the past year, 523.8% in the past week, and 200% in the past day—should anyone have latched on to the meme narrative.

Supporters at now calling for a price surge to $1, which, at its current 129 billion circulating supply, would make it worth over $129 billion—or the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.

DOGE $1 today! #DOGE #dogecoin

— Ben Phillips (@BenPhillipsUK) April 16, 2021

Interestingly, the rest of the crypto market moved downwards, even as DOGE doubled. Bitcoin tumbled by $3,500, Ethereum by $300, Binance Coin by $50, and other large-caps recorded decreases of a few percent as well.

Market update:

Everything’s down, except $DOGE, which is up 200%

— Messari (@MessariCrypto) April 16, 2021

Some DOGE traders were burned, however. Data from analytics tool Bybt showed over $680 million worth of Dogecoin positions were ‘liquidated’—or put up as collateral for traders to place bigger bets (the collateral amount is lost if the trade moves the other way).

Of that, $493 million worth of liquidations came from ‘short’ positions, or from traders who were betting on Dogecoin prices to move downwards. Binance traders saw nearly $220 million worth of liquidations, followed by Huobi at $199 million and OKEx at $60 million.

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