Cryptos: Who’s laughing now? Dogecoin’s epic surge creating overnight millionaires

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Doge started a joke and now the whole crypto world is laughing.

Cryptocurrency meta-prank dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
+98.98%

was surging once again on Friday, soaring more than 400% for the week and briefly hitting more than $0.43 in early trading before paring back slightly, but once again proving that fans of the coin everyone used to laugh at are no longer joking around.

Helped along by Coinbase’s IPO on Wednesday and an already potent market for cryptocurrencies, dogecoin has come to occupy its own unique place and become “the GameStop
GME,
-1.11%

of cryptos,” a meme within a meme that many investors are buying just to be part of something , and becoming millionaires in the process.

Doge backers on social media have set a target price of $1 for the coin that was created in 2013 as a satirical take on cryptos and named after a meme of a self-aware shiba inu dog. That looked like an aggressive target for a lesser-known crypto that had never traded over 10 cents until Wednesday.

But with powerful social media influencers like Elon Musk cheerleading an already rabid doge fan base and Reddit boards lighting up with pro-doge propaganda, the tongue-in-cheek coin’s market value had swelled to more than $52 billion on Friday morning, putting doge well on its way to achieving what looked like an absurd goal as recently as this time last week.

That confidence in doge’s ongoing rise is best summed up on social media by a meme of doge’s mascot, a shiba inu named Kabosu, photoshopped onto a cartoon body of the Grim Reaper holding a bloody scythe and going door-to-door slaying a nickel, a dime and a quarter with blood oozing out of their doorways. On Friday, the meme was updated to show the doge reaper outside the closed door of a dollar with the caption “Knock knock.”

The mindboggling froth around dogecoin trading has of course created a litany of warnings from analysts that a bubble is forming, but that kind of data-based cynicism is being used as fuel by the army of doge enthusiasts egging each other on to keep buying.

“Now that $1 is an imminent reality, we should all pledge to HODL to $10,” one user posted to Reddit board r/dogecoin. “Is that fair enough?”

“Just want you to be aware that if doge hits $9 it will equal Bitcoin’s market cap,” replied another user.

“HODL untill we all are millionaires,” responded yet another.

Elsewhere on the same board, one user claimed to have achieved millionaire status, sharing a screenshot of what appeared to be a Robinhood account reflecting an almost 700% gaind and proclaiming “Hey guys I just became a Dogecoin millionaire.”

Based on the math, the user claimed to have bought in when doge was trading at 4 cents and was now sitting on $1.08 million.

The post was later removed by moderators.

But elsewhere on social media, other high net worth users were celebrating doge’s wild ride.

On Twitter early Friday morning, Musk himself shared an image of “Dog Barking at the Moon” a 1926 painting by Joan Miró, but the billionaire industrialist tweaked the title in his tweet renaming it “Doge Barking at the Moon.”

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