Elon Musk drives value of Dogecoin up by 7% with 'Release the Doge' tweet

Dogecoin trading activity spiked by seven per cent on Thursday morning after Elon Musk once again pushed the cryptocurrency on his Twitter account. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted "Release the Doge!" when the token was experiencing a small spike.

After trading below $0.24 in the early hours of Thursday, the Dogecoin value surged to $0.2573 following the tweet. The 24-hour trading volume was stated as $2,762,760,820.

The surge in Dogecoin's value following Musk's tweets indicated that the billionaire is still capable of influencing the cryptocurrency rate. On July 1, he tweeted a meme linked to the Hollywood movie The Godfather, with a caption that read: "Release the Doge!"

Musk then followed up with another tweet, where he repeatedly wrote "Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo" in reference to the popular children's song Baby Shark. Shortly after, the value of cryptocurrency token 'Baby DogeCoin' rose sharply and its trading volume almost doubled within an hour.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin are generated by computers with their supposed values coming from a finite number that can be computed.

Earlier this year, Musk, generated massive interest in Dogecoin through his repeated tweets on the cryptocurrency that was launched in 2013 as a "joke". Known for impacting global markets just by his brief tweets, the Tesla CEO dubbed Dogecoin "the people's crypto".

'Joke token'

The cryptocurrency, Dogecoin began as a meme and has now existed for nearly seven years. It was launched in 2013 owing to the short-lived online craze for pictures of the specific Japanese dog breed. Through December 2020, Dogecoin has been gaining its value but the latest spike has triggered howls of "crypto-hype" from sceptics. Even though started as a joke by two software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as per CNN the cryptocurrency has witnessed a jump of 2000% in value since the beginning of this year.