In this photo illustration, Elon Musk’s twitter account is seen displayed on a mobile phone screen with the Dogecoin logo in the background.
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Memecoins surged Wednesday as former President Donald Trump clinched his second term in office.
Dogecoin rose more than 15% and Shiba Inu gained 6%, according to Metrik Coin. The move comes as bitcoin climbs to a new record high above $76,000.
NBC News projects that Trump will beat his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, after winning 276 Electoral College Votes, including several key swing states.
“With the crypto market experiencing low volatility during the election as the industry looks more clear about the future regulatory situation, traders will be preparing for volatility when the results start to come out,” said Chris Chung, CEO at Titan, decentralized. aggregator exchange built on the Solana block. “Certain sectors that have boosted prices, such as the recent interest in memecoins, may experience major price movements as individual countries report election results.”
Ahead of Election Day, memecoins and AI-related crypto tokens outperformed the overall crypto market. The crypto market sector is used as a measure of the risk appetite of retail investors.
A ramp-up of memecoin activity is a sign that retail investors are participating and have an appetite to speculate further down the risk curve, Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC.
“Given that memecoins have such a low market cap and liquidity, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them skyrocketing along with the broader crypto rally,” he said. “If crypto sells, I would expect a similar move with memecoins to the bottom.”
“I urge long-term investors not to focus too much on memecoin activity,” he said. “In the long run, there will be few winners in the memecoin market, and with thousands of coins being released every day, choosing a particular memecoin is like buying a lotto ticket.”
The president-elect appears to be the preferred candidate for the broader crypto market beyond bitcoin as he has promised a more cypto-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission if elected for another term.
“Trump has generally been seen as very positive for the cryptocurrency market, and any indication of his victory will likely push prices up very quickly in anticipation of the flood of capital he has deployed,” said Chung.
“Dogecoin in particular can also gather” the real prospect that Elon Musk (a long-time supporter of Dogecoin) could be appointed as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration,” said Nic Puckrin, co-founder and CEO of the crypto education platform Coin Bureau.
This refers to comments made by Trump in September, when he said he would appoint Tesla’s CEO to a “government efficiency commission.” Musk, who has referred to himself as the “Dogefather” in the past and has been known to make public comments about memecoins that affect its price, began on the X social media platform to refer to the commission as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or “DOGE”
