Dogecoin price breaches 50 cents ahead of Elon Musk’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ guest-host gig

Dogecoin has soared a mind-numbing 10,694% in the first five months of the year alone.

Put another way, $1,000 Invested in dogecoin at the start of the year would be worth nearly $100,000, based on MarketWatch’s calculation of a starting price of 0.005405 cent for dogecoin at the start of 2021 and its current trading price.

Doge’s rally got started on the back of a series of bullish, if sometimes cryptic, tweets from Tesla Inc. TSLA, -1.31% and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk.

Musk will host “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, which has already drawn cheers and jeers for the technologist. However, dogecoin may be drawing some support from one of the biggest boosters of the asset that competes with bitcoin and other digital assets.

Perhaps adding some support to dogecoin’s rally, crypto exchange Gemini announced trading and custody support for the coin. Trading platform eToro also made dogecoin available for trading on its platform.

Two weeks ago, fans of dogecoin, which was created as a parody coin in 2013, aimed to push the value of the surging crypto to $1 on April 20, which came to be known as “Doge day.” And though that drive ended up petering out, investors in the crypto have remained enthusiastic about its prospects.

That is despite criticisms that dogecoin, pronounced “dōj-coin,” has limited utility compared with other decentralized cryptographic assets, including bitcoin.

CoinDesk data show dogecoin briefly hitting a 24-hour high at around 58 cents, minting a number of millionaires on paper. By comparison, gold futures GC00, -0.64%  are down 5% so far this year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.74%  and the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.24%  are both up over 10% in 2021, while the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -2.47%  is up 6%.