Dogecoin was developed in 2013 as a joke in response to the internet’s most famous Shiba Inu dog meme. However, its latest price surge—up 23,000% in the last year to an all-time high of 69 cents this week, making it the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization—is no laughing matter.
And Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, believes DOGE will hit $1 soon. He believes it will remain there once it arrives.
“I kind of think that it might level off at $1 and become somewhat like a stable coin, where you can use it, you can save it, it’s going to stay pegged,” Cuban said at the Ethereal Virtual Summit 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 believes Dogecoin is easier to transact in than Bitcoin so that it could behave more like a currency, and that, although the total supply of DOGE is not capped like Bitcoin’s, the amount generated per year is.
“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.”
According to Cuban, Dogecoin isn’t just a vehicle for speculation if it’s really used for anything. “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.'”
Apart from the Mavericks and some other sports-related Dogecoin marketing, the number of notable organizations or businesses that accept Dogecoin is still small. However, Cuban says that BitPay, the Mavericks’ crypto-accepting affiliate, is quickly onboarding new vendors.
He also has a message for Robinhood, which has been hit by Dogecoin trading frenzy-related outages on several occasions. “If Robinhood—and Vlad [Tenev] probably doesn’t like to hear me say this—if Robinhood makes Doge easy to spend via Robinhood, Robinhood will crush it, Dogecoin will have a spectacular future.”
Cuban used his final remarks at the Ethereal Summit to clarify his Dogecoin holdings: he just owns “some tens of thousands of dollars worth” that Mavericks fans invested, as well as a little more than $1,000 worth that he purchased with his son months ago to teach him about markets.
“People think that I own millions of dollars worth of Dogecoin, I don’t,” he said. “I own what was spent with the Mavs and some I bought with my son, and I added on to that just because I was having fun with it. I’m not trying to pump anything so that I could make some big pile of money somewhere, I haven’t sold anything, so there’s no pump there at all.”
He’s simply saying this because he has a large influence on Maverick fans. He doesn’t want fans to hold on to it forever. He wants the fans to spend it on Maverick tickets, he’ll take a portion, and value will continue to go up. He’s making these claims for his own benefit. Dogecoin will go up!