- Dogecoin joins a growing list of “meme” assets this year, as billionaire Mark Cuban talks up the joke cryptocurrency
- Irrational market cap of Dogecoin is the ultimate joke on legacy financial assets
The beauty of Dogecoin is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything that it’s not. It doesn’t pretend to be a serious platform, bent on decentralizing legacy financial power concentration.
It doesn’t pretend that it’s offering an alternative to the legacy fiat rails system. And no, you’re not about to write any smart contracts on Dogecoin either. But what Dogecoin does do is exactly what it promises – make a joke about everything.
With increasing institutional participation, there has been a shift by practitioners to put on their big boy pants and approach cryptocurrencies – Dogecoin is the exact opposite of that – it started as a joke and its investors are laughing all the way to the bank.
Continuing that joke, billionaire Mar Cuban has claimed that Dogecoin is better than a lottery ticket.
In an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team said that the rise of the meme cryptocurrency is the “craziest story ever” and tried to answer questions about the token represented by a smiling Shiba Inu dog.
“Overall, when someone brings up Dogecoin to you and asks you if it’s a good investment, I would say it’s not the world’s best investment but it’s a whole lot better than a lottery ticket, and it’s a great way to learn and start understanding cryptocurrencies.”
“And you know what? It could go up. And the second part about it is if it doesn’t go up and you want to spend it, you can buy merchandise on the Mavericks store.”
Cuban has long been a fan of the entertainment and educational value of Dogecoin, joining Elon Musk in talking up the cryptocurrency to all-time-highs.
Dogecoin started out as a joke between two programmers – a parody of a cryptocurrency that was always intended to be worthless.
But with a market cap at US$35 billion, down from its all-time-high of US$50 billion, the joke’s on doubters as Dogecoin has a higher market cap than even Swiss lender Credit Suisse (-0.48%).
In some ways, Dogecoin is a way for the cryptocurrency community to thumb its nose at the straight-laced approach that others have taken.
Cryptocurrencies in many ways aren’t supposed to make sense – backed by nothing in a traditional sense, Dogecoin takes that concept to its logical extreme.
And while it’s far from being a sound investment by any stretch of the imagination, a couple of Dogecoin which currently trades around US$0.30, could be useful for a world desperately in need of a laugh.
According to Cuban,
“Bitcoin is like a digital version of gold, Ethereum is a digital version of a currency and then you got Dogecoin, which is just fun.”
And what’s the point of investing if you can’t have fun in the process?
