Crypto is conflicted.
![Dogecoin [DOGE] to rise beyond 40%? Whale activity may spur rally](https://crypto.newswireservice.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/doge-wale-1000x600-120x86.jpg)
Leading projects, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, have attracted significant attention from Wall Street, which now, at last, is taking cryptocurrency’s value propositions quite seriously.
And then you have the dog coins, the meme coins, the joke coins: starting with dogecoin (DOGE) and its knock off, shiba inu (SHIB).
The ever-institutionalized digital asset industry pretends it’s above such nonsense, but these tokens remain some of the most valuable. Both DOGE and SHIB are within the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization — the former nearly worth more than venture capital darlings Solana and Polkadot combined.
It’s an uncomfortable quirk, one increasingly exacerbated by Elon Musk.
Ever since the SEC targeted the maverick billionaire for influencing Tesla’s stock price with his tweets, Musk has turned engagement-farming dogecoin diehards into sport, leading to a clear correlation between the Tesla founder’s tweets and the price of DOGE.
Musk has tweeted about dogecoin dozens of times over the past few years — sending it higher more often than not, albeit typically temporarily. It makes some degree of sense: traders lust for short-term price signals to pump and dump so-called shitcoins, trapping naively eager newbies into dangerous momentum plays in an infamously volatile asset class.
So, quelle surprise that DOGE more than doubled this week as Musk prepared to take over Twitter following his long-awaited $44 billion leveraged buyout. And queller surprise-plus that Musk tweeted a picture of his pet Shiba Inu rocking a smock with a giant Twitter logo as that pump reached its crescendo, further fanning the pungent odor of speculatory bear market shenanigans.
It’s a pump driven by the frothy DOGE faithful pining for Twitter to integrate their favorite token for microtransactions and payment processing more broadly. This is despite the social media giant already…
![Dogecoin [DOGE] to rise beyond 40%? Whale activity may spur rally](https://crypto.newswireservice.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/doge-wale-1000x600-350x250.jpg)
