The value of Dogecoin (DOGE) fell 23% in a matter of hours on Monday after Elon Musk drew attention to the extremely uneven distribution of DOGE tokens and urged major holders to sell their holdings
Dogecoin has one of the most unequal coin distributions in the cryptocurrency space, with 28.7% held by just one person and the top 12 holders owning nearly 50% of the supply. On Sunday, just before midnight UCT, Musk tweeted:
“If big Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is imo the only real problem. “
Just over seven hours later, Dogecoin was down 23% from $ 0.063 to $ 0.048. While Musk’s tweets were previously attributed to moving cryptocurrency prices, not least Dogecoin, his role in Monday’s decline was less clear as over $ 105 billion left the rest of global market cap at the same time.
Losses of more than 20% were a common sight in the rankings of crypto market capitalization, with altcoins in particular experiencing a huge pullback. Analysts suspect this was caused by Bitcoin (BTC) rising to a new all-time high just hours earlier, which drained volume from the altcoin market.
Calculating the exact distribution of a particular cryptocurrency can be difficult, as public blockchains tend to be either pseudonymous or anonymous. However, data from several available sources shows that nearly 70% of the total Dogecoin supply is stored in just over 100 addresses.
Dogecoin founder recently announced that he sold all of his DOGE holdings in 2015 amid financial difficulties after losing his job. Billy Markus founded Dogecoin in 2013 as a joke, based on the then popular Shiba Inu dog meme. Markus said he was struggling to understand, let alone explain, the meteoric rise of something that appeared to have no real use or value.
Musk’s flirtation with Dogecoin seems to be mainly in the name of humor. The Tesla founder once proclaimed himself the self-proclaimed CEO of Dogecoin – an open source cryptocurrency – and his interactions with the coin have so far been mostly based on memes rather than any type of investment strategy.
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