American entrepreneur Elon Musk sparked a brief rise in the meme coin market after posting a playful message on his social media platform X.
On Monday, Musk shared a post about his pet Shiba Inu, Floki, being “back at work” as CEO of Company X. The post was accompanied by a video of an AI-generated dog wearing a tie and glasses sitting at a desk saying, “Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers? Is this working? Yay!”
On Monday, after Musk’s post, the price of the FLOKI meme coin rebounded from a low of $0.00006572 to a high of $0.00008469, an increase of 28.8%, according to data from CoinGecko. At the time of writing, the asset had been revised to $0.00007998.
The surge showed that Mr. Musk still wields influence over speculative crypto assets, especially meme coins that largely follow hype.
Musk’s history in the meme coin space
This is not the first time Musk has been implicated in inflating prices in the memecoin space, with the most famous example being his link to the Dogecoin (DOGE) cryptocurrency.
Over the years, Musk has posted tweets, changed the logo, and made antics that have led to the price of DOGE skyrocketing.
A 2022 class action lawsuit against Musk accused him of manipulating the price of DOGE through media appearances and social media posts.
The plaintiff withdrew the lawsuit on November 14, 2024.
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Memecoin sector weathers recent market crash
Memecoin is one of the crypto sectors hit by the recent market-wide crypto crash that occurred on October 10th and Friday.
On October 11, the memecoin market lost nearly 40% of its valuation due to the cryptocurrency market crash, dropping from $72 billion to $44 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
This has brought the memecoin sector back to the levels seen in July, erasing the gains recorded over the past three months.
Memecoin showed signs of recovery after the crash, but it suffered further declines on Friday, with Memecoin assets falling between 9% and 11% during the day.
This happened at a time when “fear” sentiment dominated the market, wiping out nearly $230 billion in value in a single day.
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