Let this sink in: Popular meme coin Dogecoin has jumped over 9% on the news that Elon Musk has officially taken ownership of Twitter and fired its top executives on Thursday.
As of Friday morning, DOGE was the ninth largest cryptocurrency at an $11.5 billion market capitalization and trading at around $0.084—a high it’s not seen since August. It’s done $3.7 billion in trading volume over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
That means more DOGE has changed hands in the past day than Solana (SOL) or Bitcoin Cash (BCH). In fact, the entire meme coin category, as CoinGecko defines it, has risen nearly 10% since yesterday.
The only times DOGE has done more trading volume this year were when Musk said Tesla would accept the token as payment in January, when he announced that he would buy Twitter, and again when Twitter accepted the bid in April.
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover
Musk finalized his $44 billion deal to purchase the social media giant on Thursday, writing on Twitter that, “The bird is freed.”
The news about Musk wanting to buy Twitter kicked off wide speculation that he would decentralize the platform, and in doing so, make DOGE (his “favorite crypto”) a currency that could be used to pay for services, like Twitter’s Blue subscription.
The correlation between Musk’s fandom of the meme token and its price has been a point of contention.
In June, Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer leveled some seemingly damning criticism against the Tesla CEO: “He’s a grifter, he sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver on what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that,” he told an Australian news outlet. “He’s just really good at pretending he knows.”
Later that month, DOGE investors filed a $258 billion lawsuit against Musk and his two companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
“Defendants falsely and deceptively claim that Dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has no value at all,” Keith Johnson wrote in the complaint, seeking class action status to represent other investors who lost money on the token.
But neither of those hiccups seems to have dampened enthusiasm for DOGE. In June, when the lawsuit was filed, DOGE had a $7.5 billion market cap—but it rebounded soon after and is now 47% higher than it was then, according to CoinGecko.
