Dogecoin Leads Crypto Market Surge, Up 6% in 24 Hours

Dogecoin (DOGE) is the best performing top 20 digital asset right now. The original meme coin is right now trading for $0.088, according to CoinGecko, up over 6% in 24 hours. 

Its current gains come when the rest of the market is in the green today: Bitcoin is up 1.3% in 24 hours, trading for $30,432. 

And Ethereum, which just successfully completed a long-awaited upgrade, is up 5%, comfortably sitting above $2,000—a level it last touched in May. 

Dogecoin is leading the charge, though. The eighth largest cryptocurrency by market cap has swung up and down the past week—mostly thanks to the whims of Elon Musk. 

The Twitter owner and Tesla boss has long loved DOGE (or at least claimed he does.) Last week, DOGE’S Shiba Inu dog meme logo replaced the blue bird logo on the Twitter website, without explanation, and the asset briefly boomed. 

It then disappeared and the coin dipped in value again. It isn’t clear why DOGE is doing so well right now but earlier today news dropped that Twitter had partnered with trading app eToro to allow crypto and stock trading. 

Musk has previously said that he wanted to integrate crypto payments into the website—and even hinted that DOGE would be Twitter’s currency. 

The world’s second-richest man now has plans for the microblogging platform to become an “everything app.”

DOGE was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joke to poke fun at Bitcoin but it gained a cult following when Elon Musk started pumping it on Twitter. At one point it had a market cap larger than many companies on the S&P 500.