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One of the weirdest 2021 happenings so far is the sudden boom of Dogecoin thanks to Reddit. Well here’s an explainer for this oddity.

We’re only two and a bit months into the new year and we’ve already had several strange things occurring, most notably the whole Reddit/GameStop thing that escalated to the point where Robin Hood was somehow involved and Hollywood came calling with several movie adaptation offers in tow.

But one of the most hilarious consequences of this already-hilarious story has been the rise of a little something called Dogecoin.

There will be some who know about this but also many who don’t. So to make things easier, here’s a quick explainer on Dogecoin, where it fits into this whole Reddit/GameStop fustercluck, and why we’re talking about it in 2021.

So what is Dogecoin?

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was invented by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke and incorporates the “Doge” meme as its logo and namesake.

Wait, what is the “Doge” meme?

It’s that meme you’ve probably seen on the internet back in 2013 involving a picture of a Shiba Inu surrounded by multicoloured Comic Sans font that represents the dog’s inner monologue, which is deliberately written in hilariously broken English.

You know, this infamous little meme:

Okay, so how does Reddit come into this?

Well the Reddit/GameStop thing happened right? Well Redditors decided that GameStop wasn’t the only thing they wanted to put money on and decided to pump the price of Dogecoin up as well because they can use the profits to buy more GameStop stock and it’ll be freaking funny.

Within a day or so, Dogecoin saw an ENORMOUS surge in its price (as per CNBC) is the joke cryptocurrency saw an 800% jump in 24 hours after Redditors decided to go all in on the meme.

Things then escalated further when Elon Musk decided to tweet about Dogecoin, inadvertently encouraging Redditors to pump more money into the meme crypto.

Next thing you know, the likes of Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons all got in on this increasingly pricy joke, causing it to reach an all-time high price and becoming the ninth largest cryptocurrency.

So in short, this whole Dogecoin/Reddit thing all started out as a joke before it get ridiculously out of hand and stupidly expensive, all while still remaining funny.

If there was a way to sum up the first couple of months of 2021, it would probably be something like “it’s all a big joke so let’s screw with some people.”

pic.twitter.com/a6kmk0PEgM

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2021