After Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live, the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin experienced a vertiginous drop on major exchange platforms. As with other shakeups in the digital currency markets, there were winners and losers in the Dogecoin saga, and the time has come to figure out exactly what happened. Was the DOGE exchange price manipulated by savvy market players?

It could be argued that DOGE traders should have seen the writing on the wall; in fact, many of them did see it before Musk appeared on SNL. Their fingers were on the trigger and ready to either sell or buy some more at the exact moment Musk mentioned the token. The 42% pullback was highly expected, but now we are dealing with rumors related to the involvement of hedge fund managers or Wall Street players in the DOGE debacle.

Rumors of institutional investors getting in on the DOGE action are unfounded. This token runs on a blockchain and distributed ledger that is visible to the public. Market analysts have already delved into the trading records at platforms such as Binance, and they have determined that DOGE is largely held by individual retail traders. The herd instinct effect played a significant role in what happened during the SNL broadcast. While there are some "whale investors" accumulating DOGE, they did not have a hand in the recent sell-off; they are likely taking long positions and holding.

Dogecoin is what happens when an amusing project is taken seriously by some and derisively by others. It is hard to say whether Elon Musk has ever mentioned DOGE in a serious manner. Surely he knows that this token gets considerable circulation on the Reddit social network, so why does he continue to joke about it? To his credit, Musk revealed on SNL that he is on the Autism Spectrum Disorder, which suggests that he may not fully aware of the effect his trolling may have on the markets. We should not forget that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has already warned him about his Twitter activity as it relates to shares of Tesla Motors.