Crypto craze fuels Dogecoin rise to $50b

NEW YORK. While Coinbase Global Inc. captured the headlines with its market debut, the frenzy around digital tokens is taking its zaniest turn yet in the price of a token created as a joke.

Dogecoin, boosted by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, rallied roughly 180 per cent yesterday, according to CoinMarketCap.com, reaching a market value of more than $48 billion. It’s now up 18,000 per cent from a year ago, when it traded for $0.002 and was worth about $250 million. Doge’s surge is part of a rise in alt-coins, a term for all the digital tokens that have sprang up in imitation of Bitcoin. Like most of them, its use case is limited, making it a tool for speculators and raising concern that a bubble is inflating in a crypto world now worth more than $2.25 trillion.