Billy Markus, who founded the original meme cryptocurrency DOGE in collaboration with Jackson Palmer and launched it in December 2013, has published a tweet about his brainchild, citing a historical message from the Bitcoin Forum.
Markus is known on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) and other social media networks as “Shibetoshi Nakamoto.”
In the meantime, within the past 24 hours, the Dogecoin price has staged a major increase, rising by 22.76% today.
Dogecoin message from 2013
Billy Markus posted a fresh tweet about Dogecoin about it being a great indicator of “how retarded people are getting.”
“If you take offense to this you're not retarded enough to be in crypto,” Markus jokingly concluded, adding a “ROFL” emoji to his tweet. Explaining where this thought came from initially, he published a screenshot with a message dated Dec. 8, 2013, from the Bitcoin Forum, where to a question about DOGE if it is supposed to be retarded on purpose, a user responded, “Yes, it is.”
Dogecoin soars 18% overnight
Over the last 24 hours, the largest meme cryptocurrency by market capitalization value has printed a massive increase of 22.76%, reaching the $0.1501 level. By now, DOGE has rolled back a little, dropping to $0.1456 — a 3.21% decline.
Overall, since the start of the week, DOGE has staged a staggering rise of 73.28%.
The massive increase in the Dogecoin price was largely due to the recent upsurge of the “crypto market locomotive,” Bitcoin. Since the week began, BTC has soared by 21.74%, reaching the monstrous high of $64,000 briefly at some point. By now, Bitcoin has rolled back below $62,000 and is changing hands at $61,990 at the time of this writing.
The Bitcoin rise was fueled by the recent clamor and institutional excitement about spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. The Security and Exchange Commission finally issued a green light on them on Jan. 11 after various hedge funds, mainly Grayscale, spent nearly a decade lobbying for their approval and launch. The largest spot-based Bitcoin ETF is currently BlackRock, which is holding a whopping $10 billion worth of Bitcoin — this epic milestone was reached over the past week as BlackRock left the rest of the ETFs far behind.
The other ETF providers include Fidelity, Bitwise, VanEck.