A $1000 bet on Dogecoin at the start of 2021 could now buy a Tesla

Maybe it's fitting because Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been the biggest cheerleader of Dogecoin (DOGE-USD), but after the cryptocurrency's more than 6,000% surge so far in 2021, a $1,000 bet on Dogecoin to start the year would now be worth enough to buy a brand new Tesla Model Y.

That's right.

If you placed a $1,000 bet on the popular cryptocurrency, which was founded back in 2013 as a joke to lampoon the boom in the number of altcoins, you'd be sitting on more than $60,000 based on the 35 cents mark it hit Friday. In fact, at Friday's all-time high of 43 cents that same $1,000 would be worth closer to $80,000 — more than enough to cover the roughly $60,000 purchase price of a performance Model Y.

Maybe that was Musk's plan all along.

Of course, Musk has been equally active in using his Twitter account to champion the accomplishments of Tesla. But the effort hasn't resulted in much for the company's stock, which has traded relatively flat on the year. As a comparison to the more than $50,000 that the $1,000 investment into Dogecoin would have netted, the same investment in Tesla would only amount to about $1,012.

It's just another way of pointing out the incredible climb for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that technically has no cap on the supply of tokens in circulation. That by itself might give any crypto investor pause, given "unlimited money printing" by the Federal Reserve is often a main reason bitcoin fans cite for choosing it over the dollar. But Doge, which also offers cheaper transaction fees and quicker settlement times than most other cryptocurrencies, has had something else going for it long before Musk jumped on board. For years the cryptocurrency has boasted a wide and welcoming community.

In the r/Dogecoin Reddit group, which now boasts more than 1.3 million members, philanthropic causes have been funded by community members donating Dogecoin. In 2014, for example, one anonymous member tipped the equivalent of roughly $10,000 at the time to a "Doge4Water" initiative meant to raise money for drinking water in Kenya. The Dogecoin community also played a role in a funding effort to send Jamaica's bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

But the current craze around Doge does stand out in its seemingly random spike. The crypto has advanced more than 400% this week despite the absence of an obvious catalyst. There was, of course, the public debut of crypto exchange Coinbase, but the platform doesn't even allow Doge for trading. Despite that, the spike had brought on a flurry of trading activity at some platforms that do list Doge, including Robinhood, which said it was dealing with "unprecedented" activity in the wake of Dogecoin's rally.

Dogecoin has also started to get accepted as a form of payment beyond just charitable causes. The Dallas Mavericks started accepting it from fans looking to buy merchandise online, something owner Mark Cuban was happy to continue doing given the insane rally. On Friday, he gave the update that the team had set a new 24-hour record for sales in the cryptocurrency.

Zack Guzman is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer covering entrepreneurship, crypto, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

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