Dogecoin (DOGE) was in the spotlight on a densely populated stage for most of 2021 as Bitcoin (BTC) and the wider cryptocurrency market climbed to new all-time highs.
Fueled by an eccentric billionaire’s social media flirt and the coordinated efforts of strategic Reddit traders, Dogecoin has surged 15,000% in value since the turn of the year, when it peaked in early May.
As the Dogecoin price boomed, so too did exposure to a mass of internet users who had never heard of an eight-year-old cryptocurrency that even industry insiders believed long dead. Created purely as a joke, Dogecoin has barely been mentioned in the ongoing history of the cryptocurrency space, which has long been synonymous with the word “Bitcoin” itself in the mainstream media.
For this reason, it may have come as a surprise at the beginning of May when the volume of Dogecoin searches recorded on Google Trends increased to that of Bitcoin. Searches for both terms were the same for the first week of May, when Dogecoin soared to an all-time high of $ 0.73. For context, Bitcoin is looking to outnumber Dogecoin by over 8,000% in January.
The Doge’s presence was predictably bolstered on Twitter too, where the tweets of self-proclaimed Dogefather Elon Musk regularly resulted in mentions of Dogecoin surpassing Bitcoin.
Data from Bitinfocharts shows the highest surge in Dogecoin Twitter mentions in late January, when Reddit traders chose Dogecoin as GameStop’s cryptocurrency equivalent.
Doge’s price soared over 300% on the day in question, and a massive 944,000 tweets were recorded that included the word Dogecoin, compared to just 196,000 that mentioned Bitcoin. Musk back then supported the Dogecoin-Pump as tacitly when he published a meme with the word “Dogue” as a modification of the name of the fashion magazine Vogue.
And so went Dogecoin’s rise. Amid the turmoil, new millionaires were created out of nowhere and others lost their savings for doing what they believed was Tesla’s twitter-loving CEO.
Related: When will Elon Musk’s influence on Bitcoin end?
But what goes up has to come down, and as Dogecoin’s valuation has fallen by over 60%, its cheaply won presence on the media scene has also fallen. After their peak in early May, Dogecoin searches on Google fell 90% as the uninitiated horde of casual internet users moved on to something else.
Likewise, after outnumbering Bitcoin mentions on Twitter for most of the year, Dogecoin was eventually calmed down and hasn’t dwarfed Bitcoin on the social media platform in over a month.
If we take a look at the blockchain stats, we also see that some of Dogecoin usage stats have dropped even beyond the extent of the recent price crash. We’d normally expect Dogecoin transactions to be lower than during this year’s bull run, but according to data from Bitinfocharts, daily Dogecoin transactions recently hit a nearly three-year low of under 20,000 – a number that hasn’t been seen since October 2018.
A sign that despite all the media hype, people are actually losing trust in Dogecoin as a usable cryptocurrency? Possibly. When Dogecoin became the toy of the crypto whales in 2021, it was regularly exposed to massive fluctuations in transactions, fees and the value of the currencies processed on its blockchain.
Related: Only whales move DOGE: data indicate large asset gaps in Dogecoins
Since May 5, when over $ 82 billion was sent over the blockchain in one day, the daily transaction value of Dogecoin has been declining, reaching $ 4.4 billion on June 14. Amid the movement of the aforementioned billions, Dogecoin transaction fees increased 25,000%, from $ 0.01 to $ 2.52. The subsequent decline in blockchain usage has since resulted in fees falling back to $ 0.60.
While the attention and usage seems to be waning on several metrics, it would be foolish to bet against Dogecoin, which is seeing a resurgence in the months and years to come. Even if Elon Musk lost interest in Dogecoin and his tweets fell silent, what other global celebrity could come and re-show the coin to a mass audience?
As recently as this week, a non-fungible token of the original Dogecoin Shiba Inu image was sold for $ 4 million in ether, suggesting that the Dogecoin hype has not yet fully cooled. In May, a poll found that more Americans had heard of Dogecoin than Ethereum – a seven-year-old project that hosts most of the developers in the cryptocurrency space.
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