Tech

Is Elon Musk abandoning Dogecoin for Floki?

02/17/2023
Bitcoin Ethereum News

Yesterday Elon Musk posted a tweet that made the price of a cryptocurrency take off. But this time it was not Dogecoin, but Floki Inu.

Elon Musk’s story: from Dogecoin to the dog Floki

In June 2021 Elon Musk publicly announced that his Shiba Inu would be named Floki.

Shiba Inu is a Japanese dog breed, and it is probably no coincidence that Musk chose it as his own dog breed.

In fact, Shiba Inu is also a cryptocurrency (SHIB), a token created in 2020 as an alternative meme coin to Dogecoin (DOGE), the dog cryptocurrency.

In 2021, SHIB had a real resounding surge, so much so that it even attracted the interest of Elon Musk. Despite this, Musk never explicitly endorsed the Shiba Inu crypto project as much as he has done with Dogecoin.

In June 2021, someone had the idea of creating the Floki Inu cryptocurrency (FLOKI), later renamed only Floki. The idea was to create yet another meme coin about dogs, hoping that Musk would cause its market value to soar.

Indeed, in September of that year, the CEO of Tesla announced that he had adopted the dog Floki.

The price of the FLOKI token in a few days increased tenfold in value in the crypto market, and with the second growth phase of the last big bull run in November 2021 it touched its all-time high at a value a thousand times higher than its initial value.

Since then the price of the FLOKI token had done virtually nothing but fall.

Yesterday’s surge by FLOKI

Yesterday, however, after Elon Musk’s tweet joking about the choice of Twitter‘s future CEO, announcing that it was his dog Floki, the price of the FLOKI token soared again.

In the space of about 28 hours, its market value rose 154%, and then fell only slightly.

It should be mentioned that until the day before yesterday it had lost 94% of its value from its November 2021 highs, returning almost to where it started, below its September 2021 high. So with yesterday’s surge it recovered some of the losses accumulated during the bear market, even though today it is still at -84% from the highs.

The current value is probably not coincidentally right in line with the average value of September 2021, which is when Elon Musk announced that he had named his dog Floki.

As is easy to guess, this is just a purely speculative meme coin being used by some to speculate on price changes induced primarily by Musk’s tweets.

It is not an investment at all, but mere betting on its price changes. When Elon Musk gets a new dog, it is hard to imagine that this token will continue to prosper.

It is worth noting that yesterday’s surge failed to get FLOKI’s price off the ground to reach near its all-time highs, and more importantly, it failed to even reach its September 2021 highs.

Moreover, in September 2021 Musk merely announced that he had named his dog Floki, while yesterday he even jokingly immortalized him as CEO of Twitter.

Thus, it seems that Elon Musk’s power to drive the price of the shitcoin has diminished a bit lately.

What about Dogecoin?

To be fair, the price of DOGE also went up yesterday, but only slightly. Less than BTC and ETH.

Indeed, its current price is lower than it was at the beginning of the month, partly because in late January it was revealed that Twitter, under the new leadership of Elon Musk, was working on introducing payments in cryptocurrencies as well.

But after the peak in May 2021, when Dogecoin’s price exceeded $0.7 thanks to Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live as Dogefather, Twitter’s new owner has not been able to really get its value off the ground.

Suffice it to say that the current value is in line with that of December and May last year, and is still 88% below the highs.

In fact, since he started working on the introduction of Twitter payment services, many believed that Musk would further support Dogecoin by making its market value take off again. Instead, none of this has happened.

Right now he seems to be having more fun influencing the price of FLOKI, rather than the price of DOGE, and in fact his support for Dogecoin has never really seemed particularly serious.

What’s more, it is the Dogecoin project itself that is not particularly serious, having started as a joke in 2013 and never having had any real development in those ten years.

If Musk were to stop supporting Dogecoin it is possible that its value would go back to where it started, which was 3 thousandths of a dollar in November 2020. This could benefit the price of Floki.



Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2023/02/16/elon-musk-abandoning-dogecoin-floki/