Dogecoin’s Worth Actual Money Now, And Meme Investors (And Experts) Are Kind Of Freaking Out

The currency that started out as a bit is officially making people worried there’s a cryptocurrency bubble. But if you’re in on the fun, well, you may have just made a lot of money this week. Dogecoin, the dog meme-based cryptocurrency, has had its own meteoric rise along with retail stocks like AMC Theaters and GameStop in 2021. And on Thursday, that rise went from a pipe dream to the crypto being worth some serious money. Especially for investors who got in when it was largely worth nothing.

As CNBC detailed, Thursday saw a nearly 400 percent rise in the crypto, adding $20 billion to its market value in a 24-hour period:

Dogecoin has been climbing again in the past week, hitting 10 cents a coin for the first time on Wednesday. It’s risen by a whopping 400% in the last seven days.

On Friday, a Reddit user posted a picture of their dogecoin holdings on the Robinhood investing app.

“Hey guys I just became a Dogecoin millionaire,” the user said, showing a balance of $1,081,441.29 in their account.

The currency has trended a number of times in recent months, but the huge rise in its value is attributed to a number of things. Elon Musk, frequent supporter of both memes and also cryptocurrency, tweeted once again about the joke crypto that’s somehow gotten some significant legs after a long stretch of essentially being worthless. Some have speculated that helped the rise considerably.

But the recent initial public offering (IPO) of CoinBase, a crypto exchange platform, has played a part along with Robinhood, the stock app that also saw users flood to it during the retail stock craze from earlier in 2021.

The excitement around Coinbase’s debut led to a surge in the prices of bitcoin and ether. Bitcoin hit a record high of more than $64,000 on Thursday, while ether briefly topped $2,500 for the first time Friday morning. Dogecoin has been no exception to the frenzied interest in these digital assets.

Dogecoin has attracted a following among users of Robinhood. On Thursday, the U.S. online brokerage said there was a “major outage” in its crypto trading feature after facing “unprecedented demand.” The feature is now back online, Robinhood said.

While you had to have gotten in on the Bitcoin craze years ago to truly strike it rich with entire coins, a number of people have made an absurd amount of money on Doge because they had a lot of the joke currency simply lying around in huge amounts. Its first jump in value in December of 2003, for example, made the price of a single Dogecoin jump from $0.00026 to $0.00095. The idea that it’s worth more than an actual quarter or so now, essentially, is what all the fuss is about for some very meme-centric crypto traders. A lot of which are currently freaking out on Twitter.

All of this, of course, has more traditional investors worried about a potential cryptocurrency bubble. It’s important to note, of course, that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were all the rage a few weeks ago have already seen pretty precipitous drops in value. But it’s all fun and games until the global economy crashes (or we cook the planet mining crypto), right?