How DOGE’s cult status keeps it alive

• Non-zero DOGE addresses have been growing at the fastest rate ever.
• There was no noticeable increase in addresses belonging to whale cohorts.

Dogecoin [DOGE] has gone off the boil in recent months, leaving nothing much to celebrate for the proponents of the world’s largest meme coin.

At press time, the dog-themed token was 23% down from its cyclical peak attained during the first half of December, AMBCrypto spotted using CoinMarketCap data.

The new year also failed to revitalize the meme coin, as it fell 12% year-to-date (YTD).

But despite the underwhelming performance at the price charts, retail interest for DOGE continued to surge unaffected.

DOGE ownership on the overdrive

According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, nearly 413.8K non-zero wallets were added to the network over the last two weeks, the fastest rate in the brief history of the memecoin.

Source: Santiment

Retail investor cohorts primarily drove the growth. As evident from the graph below, addresses holding between 0.001-1 coins surged dramatically over the past week.

This suggested that a lot of new users continue to get attracted to DOGE, possibly owing to its cult status in the meme coin space.

Source: Santiment

Whales maintain distance

However, the same cannot be said for large investors of the coin. There was no noticeable increase in the wallets holding more than 1,000 coins over the last two weeks.

While retail participation is a sign of mainstream adoption, whale behavior gives vital clues regarding a cryptocurrency’s long-term trajectory.

The fact that whales weren’t showing much interest as of this writing should be a cause of worry for the DOGE community.

Source: Santiment

DOGE also fell out of favor of bullish traders in the derivatives market.

According to AMBCrypto’s analysis of Coinglass’ data, the number of bearish short bets taken for the meme coin has consistently surpassed bullish longs over the last week.

Source: Coinglass

Realistic or not, here’s DOGE’s market cap in BTC terms

DOGE needs to come out of Musk’s shadows

AMBCrypto previously reported on how DOGE’s over-dependence on tech czar Elon Musk and his social media endorsements have hindered its growth.

Other meme coins like Shiba Inu [SHIB] and even Bonk [BONK] have worked on developing meaningful real-world use cases. DOGE, on the other hand, has remained rather confined around Musk.