Dogecoin, the world’s first-ever meme coin, surged to new heights after whales snapped up 3 billion tokens as tech billionaire Elon Musk officially rebranded social media platform Twitter to X.
The broader cryptocurrency market printed red indexes Monday, but Dogecoin defied the market sentiment, which saw increased selling pressure at the start of the week when it traded in the green zone and saw its value surge to as high as 7%, becoming the second-highest gainer out of the top 100 crypto assets.
DOGE also recorded a massive 353% jump in its 24-hour trading volume to $1.3 billion Monday, with an average trading price of $0.075.
Dogecoin whales have also been bullish over the past three weeks and have snapped up approximately 3 billion DOGE worth around $225 million in the same period, triggering more than a 12% increase in the value of the world’s first-ever meme coin over the past 30 days.
The surprising leap in the price of Dogecoin could be attributed to the latest announcement Musk made about Twitter, the social media platform he acquired last year.
This week, the tech billionaire revealed that the rebranding of Twitter as X.com is part of the plan to expand the social media platform beyond its microblogging operation and to transform it into a finance hub while retaining its function as a messaging app.
“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context,” “Chief Twit” Musk said Monday.
He shared a short clip showing the flickering letter X, and when asked if the logo would affect audio chat in Twitter Spaces, the tech billionaire said, “Yes,” before adding that the team is “cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blow torches.”
Earlier this month, Mush imposed restrictions on TweetDeck – a previously free dashboard tool – after limiting the number of tweets unverified users could view.
Twitter also rolled out payments to Twitter Blue users this month.
Talks about transforming Twitter into an “everything app” have been rife since last year, and the move was again confirmed by the tech billionaire in March.
Inspired by Tencent’s WeChat, Musk said this evolution could pave the way for the platform to become the biggest financial institution in the world, through which people can send money with just a click and earn interest at the same time.
“I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world, just by providing people with convenient payment options,” Musk said in an interview with Morgan Stanley executive Michael Grimes, before adding that he wants to provide users with a “powerful finance experience” — much better than what is offered by financial tech giant PayPal.
Dogecoin was changing hands at $0.07697 with a 24-hour trading volume up by 67.57% at $1,366,734,301, representing a 4.57% increase over the past 24 hours and 12% over the past seven days with a circulating supply of 140 billion DOGE. It was valued at $10,796,092,561 in market capitalization as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.
