Is Dogecoin (DOGE) playing an April Fools’ prank on the cryptocurrency community? Its April 1 price chart suggests that it is. The “joke currency” today surged to $0.002499, up more than 20 percent for the day.
Dogecoin Price Sees Classic April Fools’ Pump
Earlier in March, DOGE was trending sideways, going nowhere below $0.001967 and nowhere above $0.002151. The April Fools’ jump was too quick for comfort – technically, it looked like a big breakout – which added almost $49 million to Dogecoin’s market in just seven hours.
DOGECOIN GOES TO MOON | SOURCE: COINMARKETCAP.COM
The DOGE volume surged twofold as its price started punching through the roof. Based on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe, cryptocurrency exchanges hosted $47.61 million worth of DOGE-related trading activities on their platforms. The meme coin primarily traded against Tether, Bitcoin, the yuan, and – surprisingly – the Turkish lira.
The lira was branded bearish by the international media today, soon after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party lost regional elections.
Such Fundamental, Much Wow
No Wall Street bigwig speculated on DOGE, and no cryptocurrency exchange executive triggered the rally by setting a $1 million price target for the coin.
Aside from a classic April Fools’ pump, the closest thing to a fundamental indicator for the Dogecoin price is a low-profile rebranding by the Blockchain Education Network. The student-empowering group joked today that it was going to rename itself to Dogecoin Education Network, adding that it would only teach about Dogecoin and work with Dogecoin-based projects.
To recognize the one true blockchain, we are REBRANDING by flipping the “B” in BEN to become DEN – the Dogecoin Education Network!
We now teach only @dogecoin and work w/ Dogecoin-based projects. We also only accept donations in $DOGE and will launch an IEO built on Dogecoin🐶🎓 pic.twitter.com/vhKg9FaC2k
— BEN (@BlockchainEDU) April 1, 2019
BEN (or DEN?) further laid out its dubious plans to launch an initial exchange offering (IEO) built on Dogecoin. An IEO, unlike an initial coin offering, introduces a counterparty crypto exchange in a token-based crowdfunding process. Binance followed an IEO-like approach with its Binance Launchpad services, hosting crowdfunding rounds for a few token sales, including Bread ($6 million) and Gifto ($3.4 million).
Another theory: Dogecoin played a prank on the entire crypto-community in partnership with two dozens of crypto data aggregators to misreport its price on April Fools’ day. Don’t doubt that it’s possible. That’s what made Dogecoin the world’s best joke cryptocurrency, after all.