Will Elon Musk celebrate the 11th anniversary of dogecoin on Friday, December 6, with an enthusiastic message on X, the social media platform he has owned since 2022? If he does, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX could well trigger a further rise in the price of this cryptocurrency, which Donald Trump's victory in the November 5 presidential election has propelled to a total capitalization of over $66 billion.
Now one of the world's top 10 cryptoassets, though it's still a long way from bitcoin's $2 trillion, dogecoin had few advantages to offer when it was created in 2013. At the time, its creators, Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a marketing specialist at the software company Adobe, had no ambition other than to parody cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular, while promoting "a currency for the people" that was easy to use.
This simplicity would become one of the strengths of dogecoin, renowned for the ease and speed of transactions, making it a popular instrument for rewarding online content producers, especially as the transaction fees are lower than bitcoin's.
For Markus and Palmer, technological innovation is not their priority; on the contrary, they attend to the dogecoin's image, adopting as its symbol the female shiba inu Kabosu, whose photo, with front paws crossed and expressive mouth, posted online by her Japanese owner, gave rise to multiple reappropriations on the internet – memes.
For the first few years, dogecoin was content with its status as a memecoin, an object of amusement for a still underdeveloped crypto community, and its financial performance remained modest. The founders themselves quickly left the venture: Markus in 2014, and Palmer in 2015.
But in 2019, the game changed. Musk, who co-founded the payment processor PayPal before taking the helm at Tesla, had long been interested in cryptocurrency, but that year, he took up the cause of dogecoin, writing on Twitter that it could be his "favorite cryptocurrency."
It was the start of a long series of supportive statements, favorable comments – and shiba inu references – with a marked impact on the price: In 2022, German economist Lennart Ante calculated that a favorable tweet from Musk translated into an average 6.33% rise in the price of dogecoin within an hour of its posting.
However, Musk's love affair with dogecoin was not without its misfires: On May 8, 2021, as a guest on the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live, the billionaire, decked out in a bow tie and thick glasses, played the role of a fake financial expert in a sketch mocking the crypto craze. Asked about dogecoin, he replied that "it's a hustle"; the price of dogecoin plummeted by almost 40% in a matter of hours.
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