By Alice Kantor
The recent rally of a digital asset with no inherent value based on a puppy dog shows that the memecoin boom isn’t quite ready to be snuffed out yet.
The first weeks of 2022 have been rough for many memecoins, most which sell for fractions of a U.S. dollar. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Floki have all dropped between 9% and 32% since the beginning of the year, according to data from cryptocurrency tracker CoinMarketCap.com. But another — called Baby Doge — has been bucking the trend and has jumped 99% in 2022.
The reasons are almost certainly driven by speculation, just as was the case during previous booms (almost always followed by busts) of such tokens. In the case of Baby Doge, enthusiasts are pumping up the coin on social media, including Twitter, with the hashtag #babydoge. Their current rallying cry: For Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, to list the token on its platform — which is popular with crypto enthusiasts for giving them access to a wide array of memecoins.
That’s similar to how fans of another token, Shiba Inu, stoked a rally by calling for brokerage Robinhood to list it on its platform in October. The token’s value dropped dramatically after the app didn’t meet those demands.
Also read: Coin Worth $0.00004893 Highlights Crypto’s Wild Decimal Frontier
After soaring over most of 2021, meme coins as well as larger cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have retreated in the past couple of months as news of the omicron variant and the prospect of tightening monetary policies have taken the shine off risk assets. Bitcoin plunged from a record high of nearly $69,000 in early November to a little over $40,000 this week. It is currently on pace for its worst start to a year since the earliest days of the digital alternative to money.
Yet some on social media still saw the allure of Baby Doge, which was trending on Twitter this past week.
The coin is one of many tokens that came to the fore as a replica of a 2013 parody of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, meant at the time as a joke on the speculative aspect of cryptocurrencies rather than a legitimate investment.
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