While Dogecoin (DOGE) has lost over 90% of its value since its record all time high in May 2021, it wouldn’t be fair to call it dead since it’s still the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Written by: Anatol Antonovici | Updated October 2, 2023
Reviewed by: Mike Martin
Fact checked by: Ryan Grace
Dogecoin is the oldest and largest meme coin by market capitalization. It’s the Bitcoin (BTC) of meme coins.
DOGE surprised the cryptocurrency market when it exploded in 2021, being one of the best-performing altcoins at the time. However, it has been in bearish mode since then.
Is Dogecoin dead in 2023? Let’s find out!
🍒 tasty takeaways
- Dogecoin (DOGE) has lost over 90% of its value since its peak in May 2021, but it remains the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
- DOGE is a meme coin with a strong community presence on social media that fuels its hype.
- The price of Dogecoin has been consistently hovering just below $0.06, with no signs of recovery by the end of 2023.
- Despite its ups and downs, Dogecoin is the oldest and largest meme coin by market capitalization.
- While the future of Dogecoin is uncertain, it still has a market cap of almost $9 billion and may have the potential for use cases in the future due to its stability-focused design.
What Drives Dogecoin?
Before making any predictions about Dogecoin, it’s important to understand what drives internet meme coins.
DOGE is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency created in 2013 by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus as a joke. It has no specific utility, and its demand is mostly driven by a strong community that is active on social media, including Twitter and Reddit. Celebrities also have a major impact and Elon Musk has had a very special impact.
While it initially began as a joke, DOGE now relies on a legitimate blockchain network that has grown with its popularity. This growth has established it as a secure and decentralized system.
When attempting to forecast the price of Dogecoin, we often begin by anticipating the hype surrounding it rather than by starting with fundamental analysis. The problem is that hype has always been a surprise element and is hardly predictable. The crypto community associates DOGE with high volatility and speculation.
Past Performance of Dogecoin
The question of whether DOGE is still relevant is valid due to its history of defying expectations. In 2021, this meme coin had a remarkable year, setting exceptionally high standards. Let’s take a closer look at its performance.
🍒 Is Bitcoin (BTC) Dead? Find out here!
The Rise of DOGE
In 2021, DOGE made history by putting meme coins on the crypto map. From January to May, DOGE exploded over 13,000% to a market cap of over $70 billion, becoming the fourth-largest cryptocurrency at the time, only behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance Coin.
- At the beginning of 2021, a few tweets from Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, were the main triggers of the bull run. The multibillionaire called the coin ‘the people’s crypto,’ stating:
“The most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.”
- Musk was joined by significant celebrities who backed DOGE, including Snoop Dogg and Kiss singer Gene Simmons. Elsewhere, billionaire Mark Cuban, who owns basketball team Dallas Mavericks, tweeted that his NBA team had completed about 6,000 DOGE transactions in April of that year after allowing fans to buy merch with the coin.
- DOGE’s price surge came amid a general crypto bullish run that pushed BTC to a new record high. The risk appetite increased, and the support of the WallStreetBets subreddit and the strong DOGE community fueled the Dogecoin rally.
The Decline of DOGE
A market cap of $70+ billion for a joke coin was too good to be true, and DOGE has been in free fall after hitting a record high at $0.74 on May 7, 2021.
Here is why the bear market has become so cruel:
- The hype element has faded. Shortly after DOGE’s record peak, Musk Called it a ‘hustle’ during an SNL episode, becoming more cautious with praising the coin.
- In 2022, the crypto market, like other financial sectors, faced difficulties due to central banks implementing tighter monetary policies to address rising inflation. The ‘crypto winter’ wiped out over $1 trillion in crypto market cap or more than 50%.
- With a less active online community and fading hype, DOGE holders started to pay more attention to fundamentals – the coin doesn’t have any true purpose so far, experiencing a low adoption level for payments or other use cases. Its lack of functionality doesn’t encourage network upgrades or innovation.
After a multi-month bearish trend, DOGE has lost over 90% of its peak value, while Bitcoin has dropped ‘only’ 46%.
DOGECOIN (DOGE) vs. BITCOIN (BTC)
Source: TradingView
Dogecoin in 2023
As of the end of September 2023, Dogecoin is trading at only six cents, fluctuating within a horizontal channel since mid-August of this year. Below is the price of Dogecoin today.
The cryptocurrency has been trading within a narrow range for all of 2023, peaking at $0.10 in April.
The coin has repeatedly tested a robust support level just below $0.06, both this year and last year. If it fails to regain upward momentum, the bearish pressure could intensify.
DOGECOIN (DOGE) 1-Year Chart
Source: TradingView
Will Dogecoin Ever Go Back Up?
There are no indications that DOGE will ever surge again like before, but that’s the point of coins backed by hype – you never know what may happen next.
What if the community becomes active again all of a sudden? What if a strong team of developers tries to add new features or completely overhaul the network to support interest use cases and build a resilient ecosystem?
It’s impossible to anticipate such events, but the current picture doesn’t show any visible light at the end of the tunnel.
Even Billy Markus, the creator of Dogecoin, admitted in mid-September that the Dogecoin community had been dead for over a year, criticizing its active members for ‘making drama.’ Community is everything for a meme coin.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao expressed his surprise earlier this year that DOGE was still alive, concluding that Elon Musk was to blame for the coin’s resilience.
Is Dogecoin Dead in 2023?
This is a complicated question. Dogecoin hasn’t been able to show any signs of recovery for years. However, a cryptocurrency with the eighth-largest market cap ($9 billion) does not appear to be a “dead” coin.
DOGE has a larger market cap than Tron, Polygon, Optimism, Litecoin, Chainlink, and Avalanche.
Dogecoin is waiting for its moment, and no one knows when it will come or if it will ever come at all. The end of 2023 is important because the coin is testing the important support level again and again, and we’ll see if the community is capable of fueling resistance. Other than that, it’s not reasonable to make long-term predictions for meme coins.
Another important thing to remember is that Dogecoin doesn’t use a deflationary model like Bitcoin, having an unlimited supply. Therefore, it was created to favor stability over speculation by design.
Dogecoin isn’t dead, but a value of five cents could potentially represent its fair price, offering the possibility of exploring use cases in the future.
FAQs
In the short term, DOGE is expected to continue its sideways trend. When it comes to larger timeframes, it’s difficult to give a Dogecoin price prediction, but it will continue to exist no matter what, even at a low price, due to its underlying blockchain technology.
DOGE has been in free fall since its all-time high in 2021, but it’s still the eighth-largest digital currency by market cap, so it’s not dead. However, there are no signs that the meme coin can be revived in the short term.
This is a better time to buy DOGE than in May 2021, when it peaked at over $0.74. However, technical indicators don’t suggest any recovery soon. Buyers take a lot of risk because the coin is hovering above an important support level. If it doesn’t stand, DOGE may extend the decline.
Since DOGE is not an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token it is difficult to purchase this coin with self-custody wallets on decentralzied exchanges (DEXs). The easiest way to buy Dogecoin (DOGE) is on centralized crypto exchanges like tastytrade, Coinbase, and Binance.
Anatol Antonovici
6+ years of experience writing for crypto brands and blockchain firms, including Coindesk, Cointelegraph, Bitcoinist, CryptoPotato, Algorand, and OTCTrade.com
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