The popular meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin has increased in price 2,000-fold since it launched. It currently ranks 8th among cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation, coming in at $26 billion. This success was the reason for a wave of copycats, and Elon Musk — called “the Dogefather” by his admirers — played an important role in their surge in popularity.

In 2013, Jackson Palmer and Billy Marcus launched Dogecoin as a joke and named it so that no one would take it seriously. But users loved it, and the coin quickly amassed a vibrant community. In 2014, they used Dogecoin to raise funds for charity events, after which the coin became really popular, and its price started a meteoric rise.

More than once, Elon Musk declared his love for the community on Twitter, and the cryptocurrency’s price jumped after every tweet.

Dogecoin’s success sparked many copycats, with the website news.bitcoin.com finding 30 of them as of 4 August, though there are, in fact, more.

Contrary to Dogecoin, a decentralised coin supported by miners’ operations, the copycats’ issuance is in the hands of individuals primarily chasing material wealth. For some reason, Elon Musk pumps them, too, every now and again, causing serious price movements for these low-liquidity assets. At the beginning of July, he wrote the inscrutable “BabyDoge, doo, doo, doo…”, which was followed by Baby Doge Coin rising threefold. Less than two weeks later, he made a DaddyDoge shout-out for his audience: in one day, that coin’s price rose ten times, and its daily volume increased from $300,000 to $15,000,000.

But not all individuals support the Dogecoin copycats. Searching for acknowledgement, Shiba Inu’s founders gifted half of their issued tokens to Vitalik Buterin, over $7 billion at the time. He sent $1 billion to an Indian anti-COVID fund and simply burnt the rest, asking the community not to bother him with such gifts. Following the news, the token’s price plummeted down.

However, this is typical of such copycats: once a high-visibility person mentions them, their price increase several-dozen-fold but doesn’t stay there. So, if you want to have a laugh along with the others and invest in a meme cryptocurrency, Dogecoin is still the best bet.

The StormGain Analytics Group