Following Dogecoin's surge, a seemingly endless supply of copycat coins has been doing the rounds.
Elon Musk has tweeted a picture of his adorable new puppy — and inevitably, it caused dramatic moves in the crypto markets.
The Tesla “technoking” introduced his 60 million followers to Floki on Sunday night, with a cute picture of the little shiba inu having a doze on the floor.
It’s already been retweeted 17,000 times and liked 228,000 times.
But as data from CoinMarketCap shows, this subsequently caused a dizzying spike in an altcoin called Floki Inu.
Within half an hour, FLOKI rallied from $0.00001685 to $0.00004037 — up 139%.
The altcoin seems to have preserved most of these gains at the time of writing, and is still up 104.98% over the past 24 hours.
It’s been an even crazier day for Shiba Floki. It was trading at $0.000000000651 at the time of Musk’s tweet. But three hours later, it raced to $0.000000007974.
Although this increase may seem rather insignificant, just look at it in percentage terms: that’s a 1,124% surge.
Subscribe to the CoinMarketRecap podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
What’s Going On?
Following on from the mania surrounding Dogecoin earlier this year, a seemingly endless supply of copycat coins has been doing the rounds.
They’re often billed as relatives to Doge, the shiba inu who inspired the meme all those years ago.
Elsewhere in the markets, things appear to be going from bad to worse for the 10 biggest cryptocurrencies.
At the start of a new week, Bitcoin has fallen below $45,000 — nursing losses of 3.16% on a 24-hour timeframe.
Ether, Cardano, Binance Coin and XRP have all suffered even heavier losses over the same period.
Things look even worse if you zoom out to the past week. BTC has fallen by 13.7%, ETH by 17.6%, and ADA by 16.9%.
