The price of Dogecoin (DOGE) has risen so rapidly and so sharply that if US taxpayers had invested the full amount of the three COVID-19 pandemic stimulus checks into the “joke” cryptocurrency upon receipt, the gamble would have netted each of them a whopping $425,000.
But that’s only if those investors had the foresight to sell at today’s peak. Dogecoin today topped $0.70 per coin, according to data from Nomics, a rise of almost 30,000% since April of last year. It’s already dropped a little since then.
Finance blogger Nick Maggiulli pointed out the theoretical scenario on Twitter, so we ran the math. In short, the numbers were a little off, but not by much—and, either way, the thought experiment helps to illustrate just how massively the demand for Dogecoin has risen within the last year.
Update: Putting all 3 U.S. stimulus checks into Dogecoin now exceeds $500,000 pic.twitter.com/nCrSqlfTFt
— Nick Maggiulli (@dollarsanddata) May 5, 2021
This is how the math breaks down: The first stimulus payment awarded single adults as much as $1,200, with first direct deposit payments estimated to have arrived on April 27, 2020. The second check for $600 maximum was first sent out on January 4, 2021, and the third check for as much as $1,400 was distributed starting on March 17, 2021.
Dogecoin was priced at a mere $0.002330 at the close of the day on April 27, 2020, according to Nomics, and that $1,200 stimulus check would have bought you 515,021 DOGE. The price of DOGE had risen quite a bit by January 4, 2021, when it closed the day just shy of a penny at $0.009967. That $600 would have bought you nearly 60,199 DOGE. And finally, at the March 17 closing price of $0.057460, $1,400 would amount to almost 24,364 DOGE.
All told, if you had received the maximum single taxpayer stimulus amount for each round of checks and invested it into Dogecoin on those respective, aforementioned days, then you would end up with a stash of 599,584 DOGE according to Nomics’ data. At today’s newly-set all-time high of $0.711442, you could have sold it all for $426,569—from a total investment of $3,200.
Of course, the whole scenario relies on ideal timing on multiple fronts, and doesn’t consider fees. Also, many people who received the full amount in each round of stimulus payments probably weren’t in a position to spend it all on cryptocurrency, let alone Dogecoin, a meme-based token that only rose above a penny in recent months.
In any case, the last few months have indeed resulted in huge gains for the hordes of TikTok and other social-media-driven Dogecoin investors. By comparison, had you invested comparable amounts of money into Bitcoin or Ethereum, your gains (though still considerable) wouldn’t be nearly as impressive: $11,249 in Bitcoin, or $25,289 in Ethereum.
And for the vast majority of people who didn’t do any of those things, it’s all a great, big “what if” in the end.
