Do you remember what happened in late 2024? Donald Trump, according to Wikipedia, Donald John Trump, had won the US elections once again, the cryptocurrency market was performing incredibly well, and fun cryptocurrencies called meme coins were all over the place, hitting new price highs. Dogecoin (DOGE), a popular meme coin, couldn’t repeat its best performance from earlier years, but still, it came close to the price of $0.50. This was partly because people were excited about Elon Musk running a new government program with the same acronym, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
Now let’s fast forward to late 2025. The situation has completely changed. Dogecoin, one of the original meme coins, is now struggling. Its price is hovering around just $0.12. Over the past week, the price went down by 7%, and over the past month, it dropped by 20%. That’s a big fall compared to its earlier value.
Even more worrying right now is the behavior of people and organizations known as Dogecoin whales. Whales in the crypto world are people who own huge amounts of a cryptocurrency. They can have a big impact on the market when they buy or sell because of the large amounts they deal with. Recently, these whales have started selling a lot of Dogecoin. According to Ali Martinez, a cryptocurrency analyst, over the last five days, Dogecoin whales have sold as much as 150 million coins. You can see the tweet from Ali Charts here where he shared the data.
In another development, Dogecoin was recently added to the list of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana (SOL), that have their own Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs). ETFs, according to Wikipedia, are investment products that can be traded on stock markets, and they allow people to invest in various assets, including cryptocurrencies explained here.
Two ETFs tracking Dogecoin’s performance were launched last month on Wall Street. These products were created by Grayscale Investments (Grayscale) and Bitwise Investments (Bitwise). They are called GDOG and BWOW. This seemed like a step forward, giving Dogecoin some recognition as a serious investment option. But unfortunately, the numbers related to these ETFs are disappointing.
For one month of these Dogecoin ETFs being active, only minor activity was recorded. According to data from SoSoValue, the net total amount invested into these funds was just $2 million. In comparison, XRP ETFs brought in $1.1 billion during the same time frame. And since December 10, no new investment activity has happened for the Dogecoin funds.
What does this mean? It suggests that meme coins like Dogecoin usually rely heavily on regular people, known as retail investors, who are drawn to them because they are fun or popular. When major influencers, like Elon Musk, stop promoting these coins, they can lose their appeal and fade from the spotlight, even just temporarily.
That said, in the past, Dogecoin has faced similar negatives but always found a way to bounce back and regain its popularity. It will be interesting to see if the same happens again.