(Bloomberg) -- It's been a brutal bear market for crypto. Since peaking in early January, the entire space has lost around $640 billion. Every time there's been a brief rally it's been followed up by relentless selling.
According to OnChainFX, a site that tracks cryptocurrencies, only one coin has seen major gains over the last 30 days, and it happens to be the one that's the biggest joke of all: Dogecoin. The coin, which was introduced in 2013 as a play on the once popular Doge meme, has surged over 160 percent in about a month.
Why has Dogecoin been on such a tear? Answering that is as difficult as answering why Dogecoin has any value in the first place. However, one popular theory floated on Twitter and elsewhere is that its gain has is a result of it having been added to the popular Robinhood app as a currency available for trading in mid-July.
While that may seem like a poor reason to bid up the price of a joke, the ongoing interest in crypto ETFs demonstrates that the ease with which one can access a given coin may be the closest thing there is to "fundamentals" in the space. The easier a coin is to buy and trade, the more money can go into it.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Weisenthal in New York at jweisenthal@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Dave Liedtka, Andrew Dunn
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
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