Featured Image Credit: Andrew Harnik/Staff / Chesnot/Contributor / Getty Images
Elon Musk has been no stranger to cryptocurrency over the years, but a recent surprise endorsement has allowed the market, including two key coins, to surge beyond $3,000,000,000,000 in value.
Elon Musk has recently been appointed to joint-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (otherwise known as DOGE) after claiming that the US is headed for bankruptcy, and this new position is innately tied to his enthusiasm in cryptocurrency.
Musk, with Donald Trump's full support, has been pushing hard for crypto to pull America out of a significant debt hole, with the President-elect suggesting: "Hand them a little Crypto check, right? We'll hand them a little Bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion."
This has allowed Bitcoin to surge beyond $89,000 in a seven-day increase of 18%, but it is one former 'meme coin' that has really taken off thanks to the interest of the Tesla owner and cryptocurrency community at large.
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It is indeed Dogecoin - which Musk helped reach an all-time high back in 2021 - that has benefitted the most following the election, as endorsements and references from Musk himself have caused the Shiba Inu-themed coin to dramatically rise in value.
Based on the 'Doge' meme which went viral in 2010, Dogecoin was initially created as a joke meant to poke fun at cryptocurrency market as a whole, and is widely referred to as the first 'meme coin'.
It doesn't quite feel like a joke anymore though, as it currently sits as the 6th highest-valued coin in the world according to CoinMarketCap, rising over 87% in value across the last seven days.
This is in tandem down to both the creation of the DOGE, which explicitly uses Dogecoin/Doge theming in imagery shared by Musk and co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy, and Musk's direct endorsement on X (formerly Twitter), which he also owns.
Musk claimed in support of Dogecoin: "I think the flat inflation of Dogecoin, which means decreasing percentage inflation, is a feature, not a bug."
The cryptocurrency's current value, while high relative to recent history, still pales in comparison to it's peak of $0.7376 in May 2021. Its trends have largely settled over the past day or two - even trending downwards on average, but further pushes by Musk and company could see it continue to gain in value.
The combined market cap of both Dogecoin and Bitcoin is currently around $1.8 trillion, with an overall market cap for cryptocurrency sitting at just under $3 trillion, marking an increase of nearly a trillion dollars since election day.
If you're an optimist though it could be time to invest in Dogecoin, as purchasing just $100 of the cryptocurrency today could make you very rich in a decade's time.
