Dogecoin (DOGE) prices surged but did not skyrocket after receiving another endorsement from Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter on July 1.
The billionaire entrepreneur published a tweet at around 8:43 am UTC — a Godfather-themed meme that shows Marlon Brando's iconic character, Don Vito Corleone, with the text "YOU COME TO ME AT RUNTIME TO TELL ME THE CODE YOU ARE RUNNING DOES NOT COMPILE."
Meanwhile, Musk captioned the tweet "Release the Doge!"
Seconds after the tweet was posted, the DOGE/USD exchange rate surged from $0.24 to $0.261 — about 8.42%. A sell-off followed suit, which took the pair as low as $0.247. Just then, at 9:24 am UTC, Musk tweeted another gibbering message that read "Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge."
DOGE/USD rose 5.22% to $0.260 after the second tweet.
In the next couple of hours, DOGE/USD attempted to reclaim the intraday high of $0.261 on the Musk factor, but profit-takers kept offsetting their upside bias, as shown via the large minute-candle bullish wicks in the chart above.
Nevertheless, Dogecoin was still down by almost 0.5% around 12:00 pm UTC, hinting that Musk's influence on the cryptocurrency market is in decline.
Earlier this year, the Tesla CEO's whole-hearted endorsement of Dogecoin caused massive retail-led price spikes, so much so that the cryptocurrency's market cap peaked at almost $100 billion in early May.
At the time, the DOGE/USD exchange rate surged to its record high of $0.76.
The pair is now worth half of its value two months ago, primarily due to a significant crypto market correction that saw almost all the top-cap assets — including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP — crash by more than 50% as well. Altcoins such as Dogecoin typically trade in sync with Bitcoin.
Baby Doge booms, meanwhile
While Dogecoin logged brief upside pumps, one of its copycat memecoins, Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE), climbed sharply after Musk's 9:24 am UTC tweet.
Baby Doge Coin was worth around $0.00000001 before Musk's tweet but surged by more than 35% later. Nevertheless, the memecoin's value remained too low for even CoinMarketCap to calculate. Its market cap was also zero as of the time of publication.
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