OKEx lists new Dogecoin spawn, Baby Doge, amid DOGE price surge

Amid a surge in the price of Dogecoin, Seychelles-based crypto and derivatives exchange OKEx has listed Baby Doge Coin — a new cryptocurrency “created by fans of of the widely popular Dogecoin” — for spot trading, according to a company news release.

Fast facts

• OKEx’s listing had a brief positive impact on Baby Doge’s price as it rallied 25% shortly afterward, but quickly returned to its previous point and continued on a downward trend since then. It was trading at US$0.000000001636 at publishing time, acccording to data from CoinMarketCap.

• Baby Doge rose to prominence a little over a month ago after Tesla CEO Elon Musk — notorious for promoting Dogecoin and related memecoins on Twitter — voiced his support for the joke coin by inserting its name into the lyrics of popular children’s song “Baby Shark.” Trading at US$0.000000000916 just before Musk’s tweet went out, Baby Doge Coin rose over 800% in the following few days to a peak of $0.000000008859.

• A recent article in the New York Times shone a harsh spotlight on the underbelly of the industry and community of memecoins — which the article called “hypecoins.” Among the revelations is the staggeringly low cost to create a crypto token. The author, David Segal — who had no previous experience creating cryptocurrency — reported being able to launch his own memecoin, which he named “Idiot Coin,” for US$300, but that someone with more technical know-how could launch a new cryptocurrency for roughly US$8. Segal also suggested that a significant portion of the 70,000 cryptocurrencies currently on the market are hypecoins created purely for short-term gains that benefit mostly their creator and have little to zero real-world use case or value despite the outsized attention they receive on social media.

• Segal went to great lengths to dissuade the public from buying his “Idiot Coin” so that people would not lose money.

• A report published following the ICO boom of 2018 showed that only 8% of the cryptocurrencies floated in ICOs during this time managed to be listed on crypto exchanges and estimates that at least 80% of them are scams.