Of all the talk about cryptocurrencies in 2021, it is Dogecoin, literally a joke coin, that has been the most successful. The memecoin had surged over 14000% this year, rewarding investors with more than abnormal returns. Every dog has its day… but is Dogecoin worth a gamble, or did the joke go too far?

Dogecoin was launched in 2013 by Jackson Palmer, an employee at Adobe, who created the site dogecoin.com and branded it with the image of a Shibu Inu dog. It was a nonexistent cryptocurrency then, designed to execute a harmless joke to the cryptocurrency community. After seeing the site, Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM, contacted Palmer with a view of creating a working and tradable cryptocurrency. Dogecoin then officially came into life on December 6^th 2013. The token was literally designed to be worthless. It initially wanted to have a supply cap of 100 billion coins, but that plan was shelved and no cap was instituted. Instead, every year, 5.5 billion coins are pumped into the supply of Dogecoin, exposing it to inflation. This means that every single day, about 15 million Dogecoins enter the market. This factor, though, did not detract investors from the start.

Dogecoin jumped 300% within its first 72 hours of launch. The coin enjoyed massive social media attention and has always had a strong and loyal community backing it up. But it is in 2020 that it literally exploded. In January, Reddit-linked users had been buoyed by the success of a short squeeze they performed on Wall Street as they successfully pumped popular shorted stocks such as GameStop, AMC and Blackberry. They shifted their attention to Dogecoin and as the coin rallied it attracted plenty of public and institutional support along the way.

Cryptocurrencies became the craze for investors since the start of the year, and Dogecoin became the most accessible coin owing to its very cheap price. Dogecoin has received boosts from Elon Musk positive tweets and in the past few days, it has had real positive fundamentals that have fueled its rally. Pro Basketball team Oakland Athletics announced that it would sell tickets for Dogecoins. Cryptocurrency exchange firm, Gemini, also announced that it would support the coin. However, the biggest news came from renowned CFD brokerage firm, eToro, which announced that it would be supporting the cryptocurrency on its platform. eToro’s announcement means that over 20 million of its customers around the world will now be able to trade the popular memecoin.

Dogecoin exchanged hands at circa $0.0023 as recently as December 2020. But 2021 has seen the coin celebrate major milestone prices of $0.01 and $0.10. The coin has already hit a high of just below $0.7 and recorded a market cap of about $60 billion. With the craze still ongoing, investors will be confident of hitting $1. It is difficult to imagine the price making any meaningful gains beyond that. But how loud can a dog bark?