Dogecoin, a dog-themed meme crypto that appears to enjoy strong ties with tech billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk, appears to be struggling to gain enough ground for a major upward swing.

After peaking at $0.0749 on January 5, DOGE fell victim to a price retracement that pulled it all the way down to $0.0705 the following day.

Since then, the altcoin launched a mini rally to recoup some of its losses, enabling it to notch a 2.4% increase in value over the last seven days.

According to tracking from Coingecko, at the time of writing, Dogecoin is changing hands at $0.0719 and despite its early struggles this year, it is able to strongly keep its place as the 8th largest cryptocurrency courtesy of its market cap which currently stands at $9.90 billion.

Dogecoin Still Among The More Popular Crypto Assets

Although still far from rewarding its faithful holders with significant profit through a massive price hike, DOGE continues to establish itself as among the well-known digital currencies.

Just recently, BitPay, one of the world’s leading crypto payments processors, revealed that the meme token is the fourth most popular transactional currency in its platform.

According to data shared by the company, in December 2022, Dogecoin accounted for 10% of all transactions it processed, almost doubling the 6% tally it had in June.

The memecoin placed behind Bitcoin (1st, 41.81%), Litecoin (2nd, 25.51%) and Ethereum (3rd, 11.53%).

This development could be interpreted as an indication that more and more people are using the digital asset as a means of exchange.

Along this line, leading Indian cryptocurrency trading app CoinSwitch with more or less 20 million users mentioned in its report that DOGE was included in the list of the most popular virtual currencies owned by its customers.

The Undeniable Musk Effect

As time goes by, it is slowly becoming apparent that Dogecoin might live and fade with the self-proclaimed “Dogefather” Elon Musk as his social media comments of the memecoin triggers instant price movements.

For example, when the Tesla CEO completed his controversial purchase of social media giant Twitter back in October 2022, DOGE’s price registered a significant uptick, from $0.0720 in October 27 to $0.1572 on November 1.

Months before his acquisition of the company, Musk floated the idea of having Dogecoin accepted as a payment for Twitter’s Blue services. 

-Featured image: Cryptoglobe