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Dogecoin was created in 2013 purely as a joke to 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.'"
Apart from the Mavericks and some other sports-related marketing of Dogecoin, the list of prominent organizations or companies accepting Dogecoin remains short. But Cuban claims that BitPay, which is the partner the Mavericks use to accept crypto, is onboarding new vendors rapidly.
He also has a message for Robinhood, which has experienced multiple outages caused by Dogecoin trading frenzies. "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."
All that said, Cuban also used his final moment at the Ethereal Summit to issue a message about his Dogecoin holdings: He only owns "some tens of thousands of dollars worth" that was spent by Mavericks fans, plus a little over $1,000 worth that he bought 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."