Dogecoin spikes 300% in a week, stoking fears of a cryptocurrency bubble

Dogecoin spikes 300% in a week, stoking fears of a cryptocurrency bubble

Dogecoin started out as a joke. Now it's a top-10 digital currency worth $34 billion.The cryptocurrency is based on the "Doge" meme, which rose to popularity in late 2013. The meme portrays a Shiba Inu dog alongside nonsensical phrases in multicolored, Comic Sans-font text.Created in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, dogecoin was intended to be used as a faster but "fun" alternative to bitcoin. It has since found a growing community online.And now, defying all odds, dogecoin has a total market value of $34 billion, according to crypto market data site CoinGecko, adding about $19.9 billion in the last 24 hours. The digital token reached an all-time high above 28 cents Friday morning, more than doubling in price from a day ago.

'I just became a Dogecoin millionaire'

It's not the first time dogecoin has seen a wild climb. Like many cryptocurrencies, it has a tendency for volatile swings in price. Earlier this year, dogecoin started mounting a comeback, skyrocketing on the back of enthusiasm from a Reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets.Similar to the subreddit WallStreetBets, which helped fuel a rally in GameStop shares at the start of 2021, SatoshiStreetBets aims to pump up the prices of cryptocurrencies.

Dogecoin has