Dogecoin continues its surge—and it’s now the best performing cryptocurrency among the top 100 coins over the past 24 hours.
The original meme coin hit a peak price of nearly $0.16 on Monday afternoon, according to CoinGecko, marking a nearly five-month high after last touching that price in early June.
Down slightly from that peak, DOGE is now up almost 12% on the day at a current price of $0.157, making it the biggest gainer in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
The gradual climb of the first dog coin comes as Tesla and SpaceX CEO and the world’s richest man Elon Musk embeds himself deeper into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Musk is endorsing former U.S. President Trump in his quest for a second term, and Trump has said that Musk could have a position in government should he win next week. Trump says that Musk would run a department dubbed the Department of Governmental Efficiency (D.O.G.E.)—an acronym that happens to be the same as Dogecoin’s ticker.
Given Musk’s long association with Dogecoin (DOGE), that’s probably not a coincidence. And on Sunday, at a massive and controversial Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Musk spoke about how D.O.G.E. would save the U.S. a lot of money. He estimated that such a department could shave $2 trillion from the annual U.S. budget.
The asset has climbed since the event, shooting even higher than it has in recent weeks when Musk’s D.O.G.E. references have apparently helped pump the coin.
Dogecoin is the ninth-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It runs on its own blockchain—like Bitcoin and Ethereum—and was originally created as a joke.
But it became much more serious for investors in 2020 and later during the 2021 bull run when Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter, which he has since bought and renamed X.
DOGE is now listed on many major crypto exchanges and retains a fervent base of fans and investors, but still has a long way to go before it returns to its 2021 all-time high price of $0.73.
