In fact, Dogecoin has been one of the crypto space’s biggest recent winners – surging well over 27% this past week. The popular meme coin skyrocketed to a high of $0.225, making its biggest move up in several months. Even that is still well below where it was at its height in 2021. This spike further demonstrates the nature of the highly volatile cryptocurrency market. In this environment, meme coins are particularly prone to wild and violent price swings.
In just the past 24 hours by itself, Dogecoin gained 9%, reaching over $0.23 at the peak of the pump. This represents a huge win for Dogecoin. Still, that’s short of its all-time high of 0.73, which it achieved in 2021 at the height of the meme coin mania. In fact, earlier this year, Dogecoin reached an all-time high of almost $0.48 before falling from that peak.
At press time, DOGE open interest is at $2.52 billion. Open interest is a figure that indicates the total value of futures contracts that haven’t been settled yet. This figure provides us important context regarding how much speculative activity is taking place around the cryptocurrency. At one point in January, Dogecoin’s open interest peaked at an astonishing $5.5 billion. That soon crashed down to as low as $1.3 billion when the price fell.
Even other meme coins realized massive gains during this time. Moo Deng (MOODENG) jumped almost 3X in just a few days this week. At the same time, Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT) had a nice run-up as well. These maneuvers underscore the often-volatile, speculative nature of the whole meme coin arena. In this new world, usually dictated by social media trends and community sentiment, prices are dictated more by FOMO than usual market fundamentals.
The broader cryptocurrency market experienced significant liquidations. As of Friday morning, daily crypto market liquidations exceeded $1.1 billion. This marks the beginning of a period of extreme choppy volatility and risk for traders. Adverse price movements are forcing leveraged positions to close violently.
