Feast or famine on Dogecoin as Coinbase pump triggers whales’ return

Dogecoin’s listing on Coinbase and subsequent 40% price surge heralded the return of the whales.

Some of Dogecoin’s (DOGE) observable metrics depict a blockchain in violent flux amid the fallout from the meme coin’s Coinbase Pro listing. The dollar amount sent across the blockchain in a single day exceeded $47 billion on Thursday — a 690% increase on the figure from less than a week before.

Dogecoin’s price climbed 40% in a single day shortly after Coinbase announced it would open its doors to Doge deposits on Coinbase Pro on Tuesday, June 1, with a view to commencing trading on June 3.

Trading across five trading pairs went ahead on Thursday, and by Friday morning DOGE/USD had become the fourth most traded pair on the exchange, behind Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC) and Polygon (MATIC).

Coinbase processed $185 million worth of Doge trades in the past 24 hours, according to publicly available market data. Meanwhile, Dogecoin shed much of its Coinbase gains immediately after trading began, as the coin price slid 18% from $0.43 to $0.36.

As the coin price oscillates, so too does the blockchain’s usage stats. Massive fluctuations in activity are common to blockchains, and so their meanings aren’t always easy to decipher. The dollar value of coins sent across the blockchain climbed 690% in the space of five days, jumping from $6 billion to $47.5 billion, according to data from Bitinfocharts.com.

At the same time, the average transaction value on Dogecoin increased 449%, climbing from $313,000, to just over $1.7 million, all while the number of transactions being processed remained relatively steady.

Similar spikes in activity were noted in the days leading up to 4/20 day, when Reddit traders coordinated Dogecoin’s surge to a valuation of $0.420, and also during the market peak of early May.

Times of volatility often prompt huge movements of coins from wallet to wallet, or from wallets to exchanges, and the most recent Dogecoin distribution data suggests very few wallets are actually doing the moving.

The 100 largest Dogecoin wallets currently account for 67% of the coin supply. That figure is a 38% increase on the figure from 2018 when just under half of the supply was held in the top hundred wallets. At present, just 565 addresses contain almost 80% of the Doge supply.