OKEx Lists New Dogecoin Spawn amid DOGE price Surge

OKEx’s listing had a brief positive impact on Baby Doge’s price as it rallied 25% shortly afterward, but quickly returned to its previous point and continued on a downward trend since then. It was trading at US$0.000000001636 at publishing time, acccording to data from CoinMarketCap.

Baby Doge rose to prominence a little over a month ago after Tesla CEO Elon Musk — notorious for promoting Dogecoin and related memecoins on Twitter — voiced his support for the joke coin by inserting its name into the lyrics of popular children’s song “Baby Shark.” Trading at US$0.000000000916 just before Musk’s tweet went out, Baby Doge Coin rose over 800% in the following few days to a peak of $0.000000008859.

Dogecoin, currently the world’s seventh-largest currency by marketcap, has risen more than 45% over past seven days, outstripping the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum’s Ether amid a wider market surge. Fetching US$0.1995 last Friday, DOGE was trading at US$0.2899 at press time.

A recent article in the New York Times shone a harsh spotlight on the underbelly of the industry and community of memecoins — which the article called “hypecoins.” Among the revelations is the staggeringly low cost to create a crypto token. The author, David Segal — who had no previous experience creating cryptocurrency — reported being able to launch his own memecoin, which he named “Idiot Coin,” for US$300, but that someone with more technical know-how could launch a new cryptocurrency for roughly US$8. Segal also suggested that a significant portion of the 70,000 cryptocurrencies currently on the market are hypecoins created purely for short-term gains that benefit mostly their creator and have little to zero real-world use case or value despite the outsized attention they receive on social media.

Segal went to great lengths to dissuade the public from buying his “Idiot Coin” so that people would not lose money.

A report published following the ICO boom of 2018 showed that only 8% of the cryptocurrencies floated in ICOs during this time managed to be listed on crypto exchanges and estimates that at least 80% of them are scams.

Source: forkast.news