Published: January 22nd, 2025
Donald Trump's surprise pre-inauguration meme coin launch has seen the crypto's value surge this week while giving Solana a lift, pushing it to a new all-time high. Other major meme coins haven’t been so lucky, however. Dogecoin, the original and still highest value meme coin by market cap, is broadly down.
DOGE dropped more than 15 per cent in aftermath of TRUMP’s launch on Friday, January 17th. It's fallen from USD 0.4319, its highest price in over a month, to USD 0.37 at time of writing. It remains up 12 per cent for the week thanks to gains achieved over the past seven days.
Other notable meme coins have taken a Trump-triggered hit, with Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) sinking 19 per cent after reaching an all-time high over the weekend. Dogwifhat (WIF) is also down more than 10 per cent, while Pepe (PEPE) has dropped by 7 per cent.
Data from CoinGecko had the broader crypto market down about three percent on Monday, January 20th. Bitcoin held fast at around USD 104,510 after touching another all-time high of USD 108,784. XRP was also inching up as the 47th President’s Inauguration ceremony was set to begin, rising about three percent.
At time of writing, TRUMP had fallen back to about USD 42.25 from its post inauguration high of 47.98 on Tuesday, January 21st. It’s decent began after Sunday's surprise launch of an official Melania Trump branded coin tied to the new First Lady.
Dogecoin suffered its last precipitous fall back in 2022 after newly-installed Twitter CEO Elon Musk asked followers if he should step down from the chief executive role.
The response was resoundingly negative, with roughly 59 per cent voting for his departure and Dogecoin’s price sinking 10 per cent in a matter of hours. DOGE, one of Musk’s pet enthusiasms immediately started losing value. It added to the pounding crypto markets were taking due to fears of a recession and the widening fallout from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
Both traditional and crypto financial markets felt the heat. Bitcoin and Ethereum both dropped precipitously while the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 all started the period down by one to two percent. Major stock indices all hovered around their six-week lows.
DOGE had been on a different path as its price rose after Musk bought Twitter in October. When Musk officially purchased Twitter on 27 October DOGE's price was USD 0.07. By 1st November it had doubled to USD 0.14. It's been on a see-saw ride ever since.
That was still a far cry from its May 2021 all-time high of USD 0.72. That happened when Musk appeared on US comedy show Saturday Night Live.
DOGE's impact on politics finance, and current affairs is far from over. It was originally launched as a joke in 2013 by developer Jackson Palmer and established itself as the first ‘meme-coin.’ Markets didn’t take it seriously until Musk began to tout its utility. Today, Musk is set become head of the newly created ‘DOGE’ government waste watchdog
With the arrival of Elon Musk as Twitter’s new owner, DOGE saw its fortunes rise again. It experienced an extended rally immediately after the acquisition, doubling in value for a brief period to nearly (USD) 15 cents.
Even then, Musk’s outsized influence on DOGE’s price wasn’t a new phenomenon. Its last Musk-driven price spike saw it shoot out of the year’s crypto bear market to reach prices not seen since April of 2022. Musk was initially quiet about Dogecoin when he completed his USD 44 billion purchase of Twitter, but he then started responding to tweets from Billy Markus, one of Dogecoins developers, regularly on the social network.
After the Twitter buyout, CoinGecko tracked Dogecoin’s total value at around USD 15.8 billion, up from USD 8 billion and pushing it past the market cap of more ‘legitimate’ coins like Solana and Cardano. At time of writing it was holding its position as the eighth largest crypto by market cap.
The coin also saw heavy trading on the major cryptocurrency exchanges, with volumes of over USD 300 million conducted between Monday 31st October and Tuesday 1st November 2022. On Coinbase DOGE was the 9th most traded coin, accounting for over 14 per cent of the exchange’s total trading volume on 1st November 2022.
Trades on Binance, trades between DOGE and stablecoin Tether amounted to USD 1.8 billion in the same period, totaling 10 per cent of the exchange’s total trading volume. Exchanges between DOGE and Binance’s own native token Binance USD, exceeded USD 900 million, or north of five per cent of the exchange’s total trading volume.
DOGE's rise in popularity that year was partly down to Musk’s multi-year attachment to the token. He’d referenced it many times on Twitter and even adopted it as a payment method for some Tesla products and services.
Despite the price spike, Dogecoin was still down 83 per cent from its (then) all-time high of 72 cents reached in April of 2021, coincidentally the very same day that Musk was guest host of Saturday Night Live, the hugely popular US comedy programme.
After Musk's appearance the coin plummeted by 35 per cent. During one of the show’s comedy segments, Musk said Dogecoin was ‘the future of currency,’ but in another comedy segment he said it was ‘clearly a scam’.
It wasn’t the first time in 2022 that DOGE had been impacted by Musk’s Twitter fascination. In February its price jumped by 25 per cent when he first announced his intention to buy the social network. Bitcoin and Ethereum were unaffected by the news.
DOGE's price moved in tandem with many of Musk’s crypto-related tweets over the previous 18 months His frequent references to the coin were credited with elevating DOGE from relative obscurity to a top-ten ranking.
