Dogecoin jumps as Musk’s Twitter flips logo to Shiba Inu dog

(Reuters) – Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog replaced Twitter’s blue bird as the social media company’s logo on Monday, helping the meme coin add as much as $4 billion to its market value.

The token, born as a satire of a cryptocurrency frenzy in 2013 and has no fundamental use, on Tuesday surged to 10 cents around 1500 EST from 7 cents as Elon Musk indicated in a tweet he had delivered on his promise of changing the social media app’s logo to dogecoin’s dog.

With a market capitalization of $13.7 billion, dogecoin is now the seventh biggest cryptocurrency, according to data site CoinMarketCap.com. Its market value stood at around $10 billion before the news.

Musk, who is ranked the second-richest person in the world by Forbes, is a vocal proponent of cryptocurrencies and has heavily influenced prices for dogecoin and bitcoin in the past.

The Tesla boss on Friday asked a U.S. judge to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support dogecoin.

Dogecoin more than doubled in October after Musk, dubbed “the dogefather” by retail traders, sealed a $44 billion deal to take over Twitter.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which invested $500 million into Musk’s buyout of Twitter, had said it was brainstorming strategies on how blockchain and crypto could be helpful to Twitter.

“A year later, Twitter has yet to announce any crypto specific initiatives,” said Stéphane Ouellette, Chief Executive at digital asset investment platform FRNT Financial.

“It remains to be seen whether the appearance of the DOGE logo is more than a joke.”

The shiba inu token, a spinoff of dogecoin which trades in fractions of cents, rose 5.6% to $0.000014 on Tuesday.

(This story has been corrected to change the day to Monday from Tuesday in paragraph 1)

(Reporting by Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)