Last May, as Dogecoin’s price approached an all-time high of $0.72, the cryptocurrency’s devoted fan base hoped that Dogecoin superfan Elon Musk’s upcoming appearance on “Saturday Night Live” would shoot the joke coin’s value “over the moon.”
In the year since, its price has instead cratered back down to Earth.
As of this writing, DOGE is currently valued at a little over $0.06, down almost 91% since the eve of Musk’s SNL appearance on May 8, 2021. That night, Musk performed a series of monologues and skits that referenced Dogecoin, often mockingly.
During the show’s signature “Weekend Update” sketch, Musk conceded when pressed by cast members that Dogecoin was a “hustle.”
The coin began to plummet in value in real time as the show aired, shedding over 20% of its value in a single hour. So many people tried to offload the cryptocurrency during the SNL broadcast that trading app Robinhood was briefly overwhelmed by the volume of Dogecoin transactions.
After a summer of huge losses, Dogecoin stabilized around $0.25 last fall. Since then, it has slowly but steadily lost value, falling below $0.10 in the last month.
Dogecoin is widely considered to be the first “meme coin,” created as a joke in 2013 by Jackson Palmer and Billy Marcus to poke fun at the plethora of altcoins (non-mainstream cryptocurrencies known to fluctuate wildly in value) flooding the market.
The joke coin soon attracted the interest of billionaire Elon Musk, who began tweeting—ironically, he claims—about the coin. Over 2020 and the first months of 2021, Musk’s joking tweets about Dogecoin regularly sent its price surging.
During this time the coin also attracted a diehard fan base, known as the so-called Dogecoin Army, whose stated goal was to send the coin’s price “over the moon,” or above $1.
Many thought Musk’s SNL appearance would do the trick.
It did not, and a year later, the coin remains on a downward spiral. This in spite of the fact that Musk has continued to—not so ironically—tease the integration of Dogecoin into major companies under his purview.
Just weeks ago, Musk announced that SpaceX, like Tesla, would soon be accepting Dogecoin as payment for merchandise. He also recently floated the idea of, once he has acquired Twitter, adding Dogecoin as a payment method on the platform.
Both announcements spurred brief spikes in Dogecoin’s value that were ultimately short-lived.
As the coin’s price continues to fall, Musk may soon face better odds getting a man to Mars than getting DOGE to the moon.
