Dogecoin was created in 2013 purely as a joketo reference the internet's favorite Shiba Inu dog meme. But its recent price surge—up 23,000% in the past year to an all-time-high this week of 69 cents, making it the No. 4 coin by market cap—is no laughing matter.
And Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire investor who has talked up Dogecoin to his 8.3 million Twitter followers, thinks DOGE is headed straight for $1. Once it gets there, he thinks it'll stay there.
"I kind of think that it might level off at $1 and become somewhat like a stablecoin, where you can use it, you can save it, it's going to stay pegged," Cuban said at the Ethereal Virtual Summit, powered by Decrypt, on Thursday. "Now, for a while it will go down to 60, to 70, to 80 [cents]. But over the long haul, I think it might peg itself at $1, that's my guess. But it's only a guess."
Cuban bases his prediction on the fact that he thinks Dogecoin is easier to transact in, so it could behave more like a currency than Bitcoin does, and the fact that although the eventual supply of DOGE is not capped like BTC is, the amount created per year is fixed at 5.2 billion coins.
"I didn't even realize this at the beginning, when I first started talking about it... that there's a limit of 5.2 billion Dogecoins being minted every year," he said. "And given the number of billions that are already out there, that's effectively a declining inflation rate, right, there's a limit to the amount of inflation for Dogecoin. And that's a positive. It's almost a digital equivalent, whether we like it or not, of fiat. Because you can own it, you know the exact inflation rate, which is declining, and it's only 5.2 billion units a year."
As long as Dogecoin is actually used for something, Cuban added, then it's not just a tool for speculation. "DOGE is becoming more of a utility in terms of as a currency," he said. "You know, you can go to the Mavs shop and you can spend it—and we sell a lot more in Dogecoin than we do in Ethereum or Bitcoin... Now, the challenge with Dogecoin, and people are going to get mad at me for this, is if it gets too expensive. Then it starts to fall into that Bitcoin territory where, 'Wow, I've invested a lot of money in this, I really need it to go up.'
