Elon Musk made his long-awaited appearance as host of Saturday Night Live. And it appears to have been anything but good for the price of dogecoin (DOGE) as it plummets from yesterday’s heights.
May 8 was arguably the best day in the life of the meme-inspired altcoin DOGE. It hit the latest in a series of all-time highs, peaking at $0.73, and skirted above the $0.70 for a few hours afterwards. However, it struggled to recover after dipping from $0.71 to $0.67 in the space of five minutes.
Several small climbs and falls ensued into small hours of May 9. Until around 06:29 CET, at which point data shows a sharp decline to $0.50. Plummeting severely from the $0.66 mark it had been at only 45 minutes earlier.
This turn of events has been attributed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk hosting last night’s edition of Saturday Night Live. While the entrepreneur’s social media activity has, until now, done everything to drive up DOGE’s price, his mentioning the altcoin on the show sparked a sell-off instead.
Musk quipped about DOGE, among other self-deprecating jokes, throughout his time on the comedy showcase. His mother, Maye Musk, joined him for the exchange about DOGE.
However, it appears Elon Musk is more than aware of the volatility of DOGE. And, by extension, all cryptocurrency. Earlier this week, a video surfaced on YouTube, in which the tech mogul advised caution for all crypto investors. He said that it would be unwise for people to invest their life savings in crypto, and that it should all be “considered speculation at this point.”
Robinhood crashes amid the DOGE sell-off
With the highly unprecedented and unexpected dip in DOGE’s price following Musk’s SNL appearance, some exchange platforms received heavy traffic amid the resulting sell-off. Robinhood, one of the top platforms for trading in DOGE. Around the same time as the altcoin’s sharp price decline, they reported system issues on their twitter account.
While the issues appeared to be resolved an hour later, Robinhood advised its users that they would continue to monitor the situation. They also apologized to any users who may have been affected.
Reinforced by the app’s Chief Operating Officer Christine Brown, who stated Robinhood would reach out to any customers who the system downtime may have impacted.
It is not the first time DOGE activity has crashed Robinhood. The app reported “intermittent issues” with trading after DOGE hit an earlier all-time high of $0.60 on May 4. However, reports indicate there is nothing to tie this crash to the rise in DOGE’s price at the time.
However, DOGE was named the culprit of a major outage on Robinhood back in April. Amid one of Elon Musk’s tweet-motivated spikes in the altcoin’s price. The trading platform was out of action for a number of hours, citing “unprecedented demand” as the reason for the outage.
