Dogecoin up Over 20 Percent After Coinbase, Elon Musk Announcements

The cryptocurrency token Dogecoin has jumped in value over the past 24 hours following news it may be listed on the Coinbase trading platform.

The token's rise may also have been buoyed by recent tweets by U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, who said he has been working with Dogecoin developers to improve transactions with the currency.

Dogecoin was valued at roughly $0.55 at around 2:30 am EDT on Friday morning—a rise of over 24 percent on the day—with a market capitalization of more than $70 billion. This followed a rough week for the token.

In contrast, Bitcoin, the world's most valuable cryptocurrency coin, was worth around $49,000 and had a market cap of $919 billion around the same time.

On Thursday, cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase held a first quarter earnings report in which it said it was planning to list Dogecoin within the next six to eight weeks, according to reports.

In the earnings call, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the platform would also start to list more cryptocurrency tokens that had only just been created, Coindesk reported.

That same day, Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said he was working to "improve system transaction efficiency" with Dogecoin developers, sparking excitement on Twitter.

Musk is generally considered an influential figure regarding Dogecoin. Last weekend the token's price plummeted after Musk jokingly featured it in an episode of Saturday Night Live that he hosted. Fans had hoped the opposite would happen.

Earlier this week, the entrepreneur took to Twitter to ask whether his electric car firm Tesla should start accepting dogecoins as payment, just one day before the company announced it had stopped accepting bitcoins due to environmental concerns.

Tesla stated it was "concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.

"Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at any great cost to the environment."

Bitcoin crashed in price a day later. Cryptocurrencies in general are infamous for their price volatility, and experts have previously warned Newsweek about the risks of investing in the technology and the speculative nature of their value.

Dogecoin was worth around $0.57 at the start of this week having already sharply dipped over the weekend and continued to fall to around $0.38 before recovering Thursday evening, Coindesk data shows.