Dogecoin’s price increased 9.7 percent overnight to $0.19 following Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to change his Twitter profile photo to demonstrate his support for the parody cryptocurrency.
Musk’s new profile photo features him sporting mirrored aviators that reflect the Shiba Inu meme upon which Dogecoin is built.
Musk’s use of ‘Doge eyes’ to demonstrate his allegiance to Dogecoin is almost certainly a reference to Bitcoin’s #LaserRayUntil100k meme—an ongoing craze in which Bitcoin users add laser eyes to their social media profile images to demonstrate their allegiance. Musk was temporarily involved in the mania, along with MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, who has maintained the laser eyeballs to this day.
Despite the overnight price rise, Dogecoin remains 11 percent less valuable than it was seven days ago, according to cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinMarketCap.
Elon Musk’s days of raising Doge’s price by 40% in half an hour with a single tweet appear to be numbered. Dogecoin is still around a quarter of the way to its May 8 all-time high of $0.73.
Jackson Palmer, the co-creator of Dogecoin, also launched a broadside against his former project earlier this week, declaring on Twitter that all crypto is “an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalist technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially imposed scarcity.”
After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.
— Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) July 14, 2021
Despite the scathing vote of no-confidence from one of the most successful software developers in cryptocurrency’s brief existence, Dogecoin is the only top-20 cryptocurrency to have suffered substantial price change overnight.
Musk also updated his fans on his son’s Dogecoin holdings, which he first disclosed in February.
Apparently, “Lil X is hodling his Doge like a champ. Literally never said the word “sell” even once!”
Lil X is hodling his Doge like a champ. Literally never said the word “sell” even once!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2021
At least the Musks are happy with today’s market.
