Dogecoin army’s campaign to drive crypto to $1 was a bust — so why are the bulls feeling vindicated?

It was a dollar or bust for the dogecoin community on Wednesday — and now it seems that dogecoin fanatics have been left with only the bust. However, a failed attempt at producing an epic rally in doge doesn’t seem to have deflated the staunchest supporters of the parody coin.

A social-media initiative to drive dogecoin to the $1 level for the first time ended the way it was most likely to, according to skeptics.

DogecoinDOGEUSD,-5.25%was last changing hands on CoinDesk at about 31 cents on Wednesday, down 15% on the day, and off more than 30% from a peak of 45.05 cents put in on April 16.

Wednesday’s trading action comes after Tuesday’s campaign fell about 70 cents shy of its ambitious goal. Dogecoin fans on social sites Reddit and Discord, using hashtags #DogeDay and #Doge420, aimed to promote the day for the crypto as “Doge Day,” in an effort to help propel the surging crypto into the stratosphere, adding to the asset’s already spectacular gains of 2021.

Indeed, dogecoin owners have enjoyed a parabolic surge in the so-called meme asset that was engineered back in 2013 as a lighthearted riff on the bitcoinBTCUSD,-2.17%phenomenon. It is up around 6,500% so far this year. By comparison, gold futuresGC00,+0.04%are down some 5.5% in 2021, while the Dow Jones Industrial AverageDJIA,+0.93%and the S&P 500SPX,+0.93%are both up by around 11%.

Put another way, $1,000 invested in dogecoin at the start of the year would be worth over $57,000, based on MarketWatch’s calculation of a starting price of 0.005405 cent for dogecoin and a roughly 31 cent trading price now.

Still, fans of dogecoin have ignored warnings from skeptics who point to the dangers of investing in an asset that doesn’t boast the utility or “store of value” concepts linked to bitcoin and Ethereum’s EtherETHUSD,+0.34%.

On Redditor using the handle EthereumDreamexplained why dogecoinisn’t considered to be in the same league as Ether or bitcoin:

Bitcoin has a supply limit. No coins can ever be added above 21 million, so it is considered a good store of value. Unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin is inflationary and has no supply limit. Each minute, 10,000 Doge is added into the network. At this rate, miners add more than 5 billion coins per year.

On Reddit’s r/dogecoin chat forum, meanwhile, bullish investors were still touting the fact that the crypto was trading at 30 cents, compared with less than a penny at the start of 2021.