To the Moon? Dogecoin Leaps 46% in 24 Hours After Tweets From Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg

Friday the 71-year-old former lead singer of the band Kiss tweeted "I bought Dogecoin...six figures," to his 922,000 followers, along with other supportive tweets. Saturday rap artist Snoop Dogg tweeted an image of "Snoop Doge" to his 19.2 million followers. Later Elon Musk tweeted a picture from the Lion King with Musk's head appearing on a monkey holding up a monkey with Gene Simmons' head, holding up a monkey with Snoop Dogg's head, holding up a Shiba Inu dog (symbolizing Dogecoin). The text of the tweet to his 45.9 million followers: "So... it's finally come to this..." (He also later tweeted "Dogecoin to the Moooonn".) Hours later Bloomberg reported that Dogecoin "rose 46% in the last 24 hours to 7.4 cents as of 1 p.m. in New York on Sunday," citing data from CoinMarketCap. In fact, Dogecoin is now approaching its all-time high, with a market value of $9.5 billion, making it the world's 10th-largest cryptocurrency. ("Bitcoin has also rallied this week, topping a record of $40,000, before paring gains.") Business Insider calls Dogecoin a "meme-based cryptocurrency," noting it's "benefited" from the mania driven by Reddit's WallStreetBets. But they also point its year-to-date returns were about 1,032.91% (according to CoinDesk calculations). "In a world gone mad with a pandemic and social upheaval, cryptocurrencies are having a moment," writes the Chicago Tribune: [Dogecoin] bubbled along for years at well under a penny, but in 2018 leapt to a high of nearly 2 cents as part of a larger cryptocurrency bubble. It didn't last — within a day it was worth less than 1 cent again — but that set a pattern in which everyone from TikTokkers to Musk could make the price jump with some online attention, all the while egged on by investors cheering, "To the moon!" Still, it took the recent stock run-up to catapult the currency to an unprecedented pinnacle, as commenters begged each other not to sell to keep the price high... Ja'Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Chicago mayoral candidate who said he has "many thousands" of Dogecoins, sees the currency as a way for people without much money or financial expertise to get in the game with hedge funds and billionaires. "I like how these groups are coming together to really talk about what it means to play in cryptocurrency or stocks, to play in the market," he said. "It's great to see the bottom 99% come together to figure out how they can achieve wealth together and bridge that economic gap a bit." But Eric Budish, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who studies cryptocurrencies, warned they are particularly vulnerable to bubbles because they are not tied to economic fundamentals in the way a stock price (ideally) reflects a company's earnings. As long as everyone holds, he said, the price will indeed go up. The problem is you can never be sure you've picked the right time to cash out. "When people try to sell, the price will come down," he said. "That means everybody wants to sell first. Nobody wants to be the last guy selling, and that's sort of the essence of a pump and dump...." Nelson Morales, a Beach Park, Illinois, data center engineer who runs a Facebook group called Cryptocurrency of Greater Chicago, has his doubts about the currency. He worries about inexperienced investors getting drawn into a "dangerous, roulette-style pump" that could end with a disastrous crash. Still, that hasn't stopped him from putting $50 of his own into Dogecoin. "I just want to have a canary in the tunnel," he said. "The canary's still alive. I'm impressed."

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