After a three-year plummet, dogecoin is blasting off once more, leaping 250% for the reason that election of Donald Trump – a part of a broader wave of optimism within the trade, as a consequence of Trump’s courting of crypto advocates throughout his marketing campaign.
Trump’s casual appointment of Musk to what he calls the division of presidency effectivity – Doge for brief – additionally helped pump the dog-themed memecoin.
This isn’t the primary time Musk, who types himself as “the Dogefather,” has fuelled curiosity in dogecoin.
In Might 2021, its value shot up in anticipation of Musk’s visitor look on Saturday Night time Dwell. Throughout one skit, Musk performed a monetary analyst in dialog with a Weekend Replace host, who repeatedly requested him, “What’s dogecoin?” After some obfuscation, Musk’s character lastly admitted that it was a hustle. The worth of the coin went into freefall. Simply over a yr later, it had shed over 90% of its peak worth.
The losses hit small buyers exhausting. In 2022, one among them filed a class-action lawsuit in opposition to Musk for market manipulation and insider buying and selling, although the case was dismissed in August 2024.
Why has dogecoin – a memecoin that was by no means meant to be taken severely as an funding – seen such excessive swings in worth?
We’re all on this collectively
Dogecoin was launched in 2013 to spoof bitcoin and a slew of different cryptocurrencies that had been claiming to disrupt the standard world of finance. Two strangers from throughout the globe met on-line, copied the code of an current coin, and branded it with the already in style Doge web meme – an image of a Shiba Inu canine surrounded by fragments of damaged English: “Wow a lot coin.”
Though their most important purpose was to make the coin pointless and undesirable, it turned one of the crucial in style and enduring cryptocurrencies available on the market.
Following dogecoin’s earlier surge in 2021, I studied how its fervent community of influencers and on a regular basis buyers labored collectively to attract super consideration – and capital – to the joke forex.
To know the attraction of those absurd investments, it’s a must to take a look at the time and power that customers make investments into these networks and the rewards, each monetary and social, they get in return.

Memecoins are collaborative enterprises. Members of those on-line communities have an financial incentive to turn out to be outspoken boosters: the extra the worth of dogecoin rises, the extra their investments develop. However in addition they obtain social validation from different memecoin buyers after they pump up the coin.
In different phrases, behind each memecoin is a collective of strangers on a communal mission to make more cash.
Dogecoin and its imitators have been described by their management as crypto actions, shared journeys and community-owned initiatives. Past branding the property with culturally resonant pictures, whether or not it’s a Shiba Inu canine or Pepe the Frog, profitable crypto ventures are characterised by complicated webs of belief. Belief within the know-how. Belief in its potential for future appreciation. And belief that these holding energy within the networks gained’t exploit the remainder.
This loyalty is woven amongst a world community of customers who collaborate across the clock to advertise their coin and show their unwavering dedication to its success.
In occasions of value appreciation, the collective buzzes with elation.
Throughout value dips, group members mutually reinforce their comrades’ – and their very own – beliefs that that is only a bump within the highway and that their collective efforts will finally result in a good-looking payoff. Even within the coldest of crypto winters, this ritualistic behaviour helps these speculative communities endure. Neighborhood serves as an alternative to monetary loss.
The funding methods in these communities – and the conviction of their payoff – contain repeating and reposting what others have mentioned, like all conventional web meme.
Trolling conventional valuation
The actual worth of meme cash can’t be understood in the identical approach as conventional property, corresponding to shares and bodily commodities. Some of these property have fundamentals, corresponding to an organization’s monetary statements, or public demand for primary items, from espresso to grease.
Conversely, the basics of memecoins are mirrored of their community exercise, corresponding to every day lively customers, and fewer concrete metrics, corresponding to social sentiment and mindshare – how a lot public consciousness a coin has generated in contrast with its rivals.
After all, the valuations of conventional property are additionally affected by these social elements. The distinction is that memecoins provide little by means of productive exercise. They add nothing to the financial system. Often, their management will construct monetary companies round them, however these are usually added as afterthoughts, particularly as a approach to drum up extra speculative pleasure.
Memecoins troll the standard conventions of valuation and mock the edicts and dogmas of mainstream buyers.
And that’s precisely the purpose.
Participation in memecoin communities – or any crypto group, for that matter – entails embracing another financial expertise. They’re speculative sandboxes for enjoying exterior of the standard guidelines of funding.
Who let the doge out?
Musk is the quintessential meme coininfluencer.
Because the richest man on the earth, he’s considered by many as a paragon of savvy investing. His large following extends far past dogecoin’s social community. And his promotional efforts are playful – so playful that the choose in his class-action case dismissed his dogecoin tweets as mere “puffery” and that “no cheap investor might depend on them”.
Dogecoin beforehand reached the height of its memetic momentum when Musk appeared on Saturday Night time Dwell. Now, as a substitute of sitting on the Weekend Replace information desk cracking jokes, he’s sitting in Trump’s workplace advising the president-elect. In different phrases, dogecoin’s memetic resonance has ascended from popular culture to politics, serving to it seize a much bigger slice of the general public’s mindshare.
Whereas dogecoin has particularly benefited from Musk’s proximity to Trump, the broader crypto market is leaping with optimism for a crypto-friendly administration. Talking on the Bitcoin 2024 convention in July, the GOP candidate ensured he’d make the US “the crypto capital of the planet.” After pouring US$131-million into this election cycle, the crypto trade can now declare 274 pro-crypto members of the US home of representatives and 20 pro-crypto US senators.
Between Musk buddying up with Trump and a shifting regulatory atmosphere, the canine can as soon as once more run free.
- The creator, Maximilian Brichta, is doctoral scholar of communication, College of Southern California
- This text is republished from The Dialog beneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article