Dogecoin Leads Meme Coin Rally with With Pepe and Baby Doge

Bitcoin may be down this week—but one cryptocurrency is defying the general drop in digital asset prices: Dogecoin.

The eighth largest digital asset and original meme coin is right now up nearly 6% in the past week, trading for $0.088, according to CoinGecko.

And it's bringing the other meme coins with it. At the time of writing, Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE) had soared by over 40% in seven days, trading for $0.000000003402.

Other meme coins are also up significantly in the past week, CoinGecko data shows. Meme-coin-of-the-moment PepeCoin (PEPE) is up significantly too—although exact data is somewhat limited because the cryptocurrency was only launched on April 17.

One investor managed to turn $250 into $1.02 million in just four days. At one point yesterday, the new coin had exploded in value by over 240% in 24 hours.

Meme coins are digital assets that based on Internet memes. They often do not have any utility and are highly volatile. They exploded in popularity back in 2020.

Dogecoin—which trades as DOGE—was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joking tribute to the “doge” meme of a Shiba Inu dog to poke fun at the seriousness of the Bitcoin world.

But then Tesla CEO Elon Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020, and it surged in value.

Since then, Musk has argued the coin has utility for payments. And DOGE developers exclusively told Decrypt they were briefly working with Musk on improving the cryptocurrency.

The billionaire entrepreneur has even teased the idea that it could be Twitter's currency. Earlier this month, Twitter—where Musk has been CEO since he closed his deal to acquire the company in October—replaced its blue bird logo with Doge. It's since been switched back to the original logo, but Doge's price briefly surged by 20% as a result.

A lot of other coins and tokens are slumping over the past seven days, though.

Bitcoin earlier this month pushed past the $30,000 mark for the first time in 10 months. But it is now down 3.5% in the past week, trading hands for $28,775.