Dogecoin’s price is soaring while the rest of crypto crumbles — Quartz

As crypto crumbles, Dogecoin rises.

Over the past there months, Dogecoin—a cryptocurrency created in 2013 as a joke—has roughly doubled in value. The digital token, which its own creator still dismisses as ridiculous, inexplicably claims a $740 million market cap and an average daily trading volume worth millions of dollars. In recent weeks the bottom has fallen out in the markets for bitcoin, ether, and other crypto assets; ether has fallen by around 70% over the past three months against the dollar.

Dogecoin gets its name from the quizzical Shiba Inu dog that launched a thousand memes. According to CoinMarketCap, it primarily trades against the US dollar Tether on two exchanges, ZB.com (based in China) and Gate.io (which appears to be based in the Cayman Islands). Although Dogecoin is the 17th-largest cryptocurrency by market value, its originator—Jackson Palmer, a product manager at Adobe—is far from impressed.

Despite its jokey origins, crypto hobbyists have found whizzy…