KEY POINTS

  • Last year, Dogecoin price rose in run-up to Doge Day
  • This year DOGE traded at $0.1461 on Doge Day
  • Dogecoin is the largest meme token in terms of market cap

Dogecoin, the world's first-ever dog-themed meme coin, celebrated Doge Day on April 20 — but that did not help to fire up the token's fortunes this year.

That is a big contrast from last year when Doge price skyrocketed $0.4073 on April 19, in the run-up to Doge Day; it then declined to $0.2485 by April 23. But by May 7, it had climbed to $0.6848.

Dogecoin traded at a 24-hour high of $0.1461, with a 24-hour trading volume of $893.18 Wednesday, based on the data from CoinMarketCap. That is a 65.3% decline y-o-y from last year's Doge Day.

The meme coin has recorded a 16.4% loss since the beginning of 2022 and has lost over 81% since its price peaked in May 2021. Twelve months ago, DOGE supporters tried to push the meme coin's price to moon at $1, when it was only trading at nine cents a week prior.

Representations of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, DogeCoin, Ripple, Litecoin are placed on PC motherboard in this illustration taken, June 29, 2021.
Representations of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, DogeCoin, Ripple, Litecoin are placed on PC motherboard in this illustration taken, June 29, 2021. Reuters / Dado Ruvic

The token's value did not hit the $1 target, but Dogecoin holders received a payoff when the dog-themed meme coin skyrocketed to an all-time high of $0.74 in May 2021— a massive surge from just about one cent at the beginning of 2021.

Last year, Dogecoin was always in the spotlight, with Elon Musk hinting at accepting DOGE as payment for Tesla, and talk show host Ellen Degeneres discussing the meme coin with billionaire Mark Cuban.

This year, by contrast, has been lackluster for DOGE. Billy Markus, one of the co-founders of Dogecoin who goes by the Twitter handle Shibetoshi Nakamoto, captured the mood Tuesday in a tweet: "Q: What should we expect on #dogeday for dogecoin price action tomorrow? A: nothing."

He later greeted fans, "Happy Doge Day," alongside a dog GIF animation. The mood was celebratory, but the day's build-up was unlike last year."

Despite this, Dogecoin is still the largest meme-based crypto asset with an $18.8 billion market cap. On that metric, it sits in the 12th spot among the 13,671 cryptocurrencies today.

Dogecoin was trading down 3.40% at $0.1368, with a 24-hour market volume of $744,806,008, as of 10:01 a.m. ET on Thursday, based on data from CoinMarketCap.