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Elon Musk may be starting the second half of 2021 where he started the first six months of the year: making passing references to crypto like dogecoin.
On Thursday, the Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
and SpaceX CEO made reference to meme asset dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
via Twitter, which briefly spiked but the real impact of his social-media musings may have had a more lasting impact on a little-known asset: Baby Doge coin, which was up nearly 40% on the day, according to CoinMarketCap.com, which provides data on thousands of crypto.
Dogecoin, which was created back in 2013, has spawned a host of copycats and offshoot assets that are mostly influenced by social-media mentions and not necessarily by fundamentals. Dogecoin was originated as a lighthearted coin in the midst of a flurry of digital assets aiming to be alternatives to bitcoin.
Musk’s comments on Thursday delivered a slight nudge to dogecoin but the virtual currency has mostly been trading under pressure since hitting a peak in early May at 74.07 cents.
At last check, dogecoin was changing hands at 24.6 cents on CoinDesk, up 1.4%, but it was up nearly 5,100% since Musk started issuing missives about doge earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Baby Doge Coin, described on its website as a “new crypto birthed by fans & members of the Doge Coin online community,’ was the real winner in the Musk tweets. The meme-of-a-meme crypto was created about a month ago, according to its website and was trading under $0.00000001.
Baby Doge Coin website
It is unclear if Musk was specifically referencing Baby Doge in his tweet or parodying the popular children’s song Baby Shark made by a South Korean company called Pinkfong!.
Musk’s social-media messages over the past year have had outsize influence on the prices of dogecoin and bitcoin and he’s at least partly blamed for the slump in bitcoin and the broader crypto complex in the last two monhs. An article in May in The Wall Street Journal described him as bitcoin’s biggest influencer.
However, some were questioning whether he was losing his mojo with his latest social-media messages.
The current downturn in crypto has morphed into a narrative about the migration of bitcoin miners out of China after the country has banned crypto activity in the People’s Republic.
Bitcoin prices were changing hands at around $33,300 on Thursday, down 3%, after the worst second-quarter for the world’s No. 1 crypto and Ether
ETHUSD,
running on the Ethereum blockchain.
Declines for crypto and unsteady trade in meme stocks come as the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
the S&P 500
SPX,
and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
indexes are all trading at or near record levels.
