Will Elon Musk celebrate the eleventh anniversary of dogecoin on Friday, December 6 with an enthusiastic message on X, the social network he has owned since 2022? If this is the case, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX could well trigger a new rise in the price of this cryptoasset, which Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election on November 5 propelled towards total capitalization, at more than 66 billion dollars (62 billion euros).
Thus arriving in the top 10 of the most important cryptoassets in the world, even if it remains far from the 2,035 billion dollars of bitcoin, dogecoin nevertheless had few advantages to showcase at its birth, in 2013. At the time, its creators, Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a marketing specialist at the software publisher Adobe, have no other ambition than to parody cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular, all by promoting “a currency for the people”easy to use.
This simplicity will be one of the strengths of dogecoin, renowned for the ease and speed of transactions, which will make it a widespread instrument for rewarding content producers on the Internet, especially since transaction fees are lower than those of bitcoin.
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For MM. Markus and Palmer, technological innovation is therefore not their priority; on the other hand, they take care of the image of dogecoin, adopting as their emblem Kabosu, a shiba inu dog, whose photo, crossed front legs and expressive mouth, posted online by her Japanese owner, gave rise to multiple misappropriations on Internet, a meme in networking jargon.
Support from Elon Musk
In the first years, dogecoin was therefore content with its status as « memecoin »an object of amusement for a crypto community that is still underdeveloped, and its financial performance remains modest. The founders themselves quickly left the adventure: Mr. Markus, in 2014, and Mr. Palmer, in 2015.
But, in 2019, the situation is changing. Elon Musk, who co-founded the payments specialist PayPal before taking the helm of Tesla, has been interested in cryptoassets for a long time, but that year, he took up the cause of dogecoin by writing on Twitter that it could be “his favorite cryptocurrency”.
This is the start of a long series of statements of support, favorable comments – and nods to the shiba inu – with a marked impact on the price: in 2022, a German economist, Lennart Ante, calculated that A favorable tweet from Mr. Musk resulted on average in a 6.33% increase in the price of dogecoin in the hour following its publication.
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