Dogecoin jumps as Elon Musk's Twitter flips logo to Shiba Inu dog

Dogecoin's Shiba Inu dog replaced Twitter's blue bird as the social media company's logo on Tuesday, helping the meme coin add as much as $4 billion to its market value.

The token, born as a satire of a cryptocurrency frenzy in 2013 and has no fundamental use, surged to 10 cents around 1500 EST from 7 cents as Elon Musk indicated in a tweet on Monday he had delivered on his promise of changing the social media app's logo to dogecoin's dog.

With a market capitalization of $13.7 billion, dogecoin is now the seventh biggest cryptocurrency, according to data site CoinMarketCap.com. Its market value stood at around $10 billion before the news.


Musk, who is ranked as the second-richest person in the world by Forbes, is a vocal proponent of cryptocurrencies and has heavily influenced prices for dogecoin and bitcoin in the past.

The Tesla boss on Friday asked a U.S. judge to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support dogecoin.

Dogecoin more than doubled in October after Musk, dubbed "the dogefather" by retail traders, sealed a $44 billion deal to take over Twitter in October.

The shiba inu token, a spinoff of dogecoin which trades in fractions of cents, rose 5.6% to $0.000014.