Dogecoin price pops and drops after Kabosu's death, Elon Musk tweet

Dogecoin ( DOGE +4.19% ) has witnessed a couple of brief spikes following the death of its inspiration .

The first price spike occurred around 1:40 a.m. ET, when news of the dog that kickstarted a meme had passed away.

“Today, Kabosu, our community's shared friend and inspiration, peacefully passed, in the arms of her person,” dogecoin’s official X account wrote on Friday. “The impact this one dog has made across the world is immeasurable.”

The Shiba Inu-based meme went viral in the early 2010s, which led to the creation of dogecoin in December 2013. DOGE is now the largest memecoin by market capitalization and inspired several other major dog-themed memecoins.

The second spike occurred around 11 a.m. ET, when perhaps the memecoin’s most well-known proponent tweeted about Kabosu’s passing.

 

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX, tweeted an image of the Shiba meme joined by a gorilla. “OG Doge has ascended to heaven to be with his friend Harambe,” Musk wrote on X. The inclusion of the gorilla points to yet another piece of internet history.

In May 2016, a young boy visiting the Cincinnati Zoo climbed under a fence into an outdoor gorilla space, where he was violently dragged by Harambe. A zoo worker shot and killed the 17-year-old gorilla, which led to a slew of internet memorials and memes.

Musk is the world’s richest person and helped dogecoin surge to all-time highs in the summer of 2021 with his frequent tweets and endorsements of the memecoin. In December 2023, Musk said he spends “hardly” any time thinking about cryptocurrency.

DOGE trades around $0.17 at publication time, up 3.8% over the past 24 hours according to The Block’s pricing data . Over that period, about $2.8 billion worth of doge has been traded.

Related tokens such as Shiba Inu (SHIB) and FLOKI (FLOKI) also witnessed brief spikes on the news.