(Reuters) – Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog replaced Twitter’s blue bird as the social media company’s logo on Tuesday, helping the meme coin add as much as $4 billion to its market value.
The token, born as a satire of a cryptocurrency frenzy in 2013 and has no fundamental use, surged to 10 cents around 1500 EST from 7 cents as Elon Musk indicated in a tweet on Monday he had delivered on his promise of changing the social media app’s logo to dogecoin’s dog.
With a market capitalization of $13.7 billion, dogecoin is now the seventh biggest cryptocurrency, according to data site CoinMarketCap.com. Its market value stood at around $10 billion before the news.
Musk, who is ranked as the second-richest person in the world by Forbes, is a vocal proponent of cryptocurrencies and has heavily influenced prices for dogecoin and bitcoin in the past.
The Tesla boss on Friday asked a U.S. judge to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support dogecoin.
Dogecoin more than doubled in October after Musk, dubbed “the dogefather” by retail traders, sealed a $44 billion deal to take over Twitter in October.
The shiba inu token, a spinoff of dogecoin which trades in fractions of cents, rose 5.6% to $0.000014.
(Reporting by Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
