Ever heard the one about the joke that’s worth $50 billion?
In 2013, two friends created Dogecoin—a parody of a cryptocurrency that was meant to be worthless. Its mascot is a meme-worthy Shiba-Inu that can’t quite spell or get its grammar right.
It definitely did not stay worthless. Dogecoin’s value has rocketed up 18,000% over the past year. Even as Bitcoin dipped dramatically over the weekend, Dogecoin was trading near all-time highs. As the Shiba-Inu would say: “Wow. Much inexplicable.”
Elon Musk tweets about it. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban believes it’s educational and entertaining. And crypto bull Mike Novogratz says he’d be “very, very worried” if one of his friends was investing in it.
On Tuesday, Dogecoin hovered up around 42 cents—evidence that not everyone is paying heed to Novogratz’s skepticism. Many are even seeing unexpected gains.
Those include Alyssa Vazquez, a 26-year-old accountant from Dallas.
Vazquez originally bought $600 worth of Dogecoin in January and February with her husband as a joke, thinking that they probably wouldn’t get anything out of it. “When we started, we agreed that we would never put in more than we could afford to lose,” she said. Now, they are up around $6,000.
“We got into it around the time that GameStop went off. We started reading tweets about how this coin was up,” she said in a phone interview. When the currency rallied she was completely taken by surprise. “My husband text me like: ‘Did you see this?’ I was just shocked.”
Vazquez and her husband had previously invested in Litecoin and Ethereum, but said they hadn’t dabbled much further. “We didn’t really trust it back then,” she said. “The blow-up of Bitcoin changed our opinion.”
The couple are trying to figure out the best time to get out of Doge. They hope to use their earnings to pay off some debt, including student loans. But before then, they will probably buy more. And they have already started investing in another new cryptocurrency: FaceMoon. They’ve put in around $500.
Brayden Johnson, 26, an electrician from Alberta, Canada, bought Dogecoin in memory of his Shiba Inu named Hudson who passed away last year at age 15.
“I actually think about him anytime someone says the word doge,” Johnson wrote in an email. “I can picture in my head all the times that I’ve seen him do the goofy face of the meme and all his fur get scrunched up in his collar.”
When Johnson saw that Dogecoin was up big, he was really excited and did not expect it to gain so much at such a rapid rate.
“It feels good to be up, because who couldn’t use some extra money?” he said. “It feels a little sweeter that an investment made because I missed my dog has paid such nice dividends.”
This week’s surge may appear confounding. How can a joke be worth so much?
FOMO has a lot to do with it.