Dogecoin, Shiba Inu Ride the Elon Musk Hype Cycle

Tesla CEO and some-time Saturday Night Live guest Elon Musk has once again shifted the already volatile cryptocurrency markets with a series of tweets, causing the prices of meme coins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin to fluctuate wildly. 

First up, Shiba Inu coin, which hit all-time highs of $0.00004432 on Sunday evening, according to CoinGecko. 

Its recent surge came as a petition to list the cryptocurrency on retail trading app Robinhood hit 200,000 signatures. “This petition is designed to kindly request of Robinhood to please list Shiba Inu coin to trade,” reads the appeal on Change.org. “Let's encourage Robinhood to be the first traditional brokerage to get on this train!”

After it reached 200,000 signatures, the petition-lister, Tristan Luke, wrote, “Congratulations guys.  You did it. Webull has gotten there first, and already listed Shib.  All indications are that Robinhood will soon follow.”

Webull is a New York-based firm that offers commission-free stock trading on mobile apps, not unlike Robinhood. 

Despite “all indications,” many experts aren’t convinced by the reasons behind the latest move, however. Vijay Ayyar, head of Asia-Pacific affairs at crypto exchange Luno, reportedly told Bloomberg, “With such meme coins it’s hard to speculate on the actual reasons for price movements, in all honesty.”

The token's subsequent price plunge of nearly 12% can, however, be linked to Elon Musk's Twitter musings. When asked how much Shiba Inu coin he owns on Twitter, the Tesla CEO answered simply: “none.” 

None

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 24, 2021

Musk again responded that he “acquired some ascii hash strings called ‘Bitcoin, Ethereum & Doge.’”

Unlike Shiba Inu, Dogecoin appears to have surged in response to Musk's endorsement, rising nearly 7% since his comment. 

Musk’s history with Dogecoin is long-standing and well-documented. Beyond simply tweeting, he’s also worked closely with the developers behind the project to improve the underlying protocol. 

Ross Nicoll, a Dogecoin Core developer, told Decrypt in May that the Tesla CEO had been messaging with the developers and even volunteered to fund their work (an offer that they declined). 

Since the uptick in activity back in May, Dogecoin is now a whopping 63.7% from its all-time highs. In the last 24 hours, however, the meme coin has walked that figure back, after mounting an impressive 6.5% rally. 

And like many Dogecoin rallies, the source of the latest move can be traced back to a tweet from Musk. At roughly the same time he announced that he didn’t own any Shiba Inu coin, he broke down the reasons behind his support of Dogecoin. 

“Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge,” he said. “They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge – it felt like the people’s crypto.”