'Dogecoin Millionaire' Regains Title After DOGE Pump—And This Time, He's Selling

It’s been a wild ride for the “Dogecoin Millionaire” over the last few years as his net worth touched $3 million and then fell to the hundreds of thousands. But with the leading meme coin surging to a price point unseen since 2021, he’s reclaimed the title.

Glauber Contessoto spent his life savings and loaded up credit cards to buy $180,000 worth of Dogecoin in late 2020 and early 2021. The following year, his stash shot up in value to $3 million—but he didn’t sell.

In the months following, his fortunes fell to $200,000 and Dogecoin lost momentum. For years, he said he has been tormented for this fumble, sticking to his convictions amid the downward market moves. But now the title is legit again, and Contessoto is weighing a different move this time around.

Contessoto, better known as ProTheDoge, reclaimed his status as the ”Dogecoin Millionaire” last week as the coin surpassed a price of $0.20. Over the next few days, as the meme coin continued to soar above $0.40, his holdings peaked at a value of just over $2.1 million.

“Everything I said would happen is happening. It definitely feels good,” Contessoto told Decrypt. “I can never duplicate the feeling of the first time becoming a millionaire from having nothing, but this is like a really good sequel.”

When he first became a Dogecoin millionaire, Contessoto was working a full-time job, living in a humble flat and driving a notoriously beat-up Toyota. During this period, he documented his journey on YouTube, showing his holdings at the end of every video.

“I had a lot of people that bought in because of me. And I felt a duty to them not to sell,” Contessoto told Decrypt. “When things took a downturn, Dogecoin went right back down—and I had lost so much money, I had a lot of people turn on me.”

He said that every day he logged onto social media, following the fall of DOGE, he would see streams of hate from people who claimed to have lost money because of him.

During the lowest period, as DOGE sold for just $0.055, he claims that his holdings sat at around $200,000. At this moment, he questioned what he was doing this all for with his finger hovering over the sell button. He clicked a button—but it was to buy another 1.3 million DOGE, which he claims cost him approximately $71,500 at the time.

Now that those dark days are behind him, he says that he will be selling—but not the whole stash.

“I'm definitely going to sell this time around. One lesson I obviously learned was to take profits,” he told Decrypt. “Am I going to sell my entire bag of Dogecoin? Probably not.”

Contessoto said that he is devising an exit strategy by consulting more experienced traders than himself. Broadly speaking, he said that he’ll start slowly taking money out of the meme coin when he believes that Bitcoin is starting to reach its peak.

While the last three years were filled with people taking “stabs” at him for the $3 million fumble, he believes in the long run that it was ultimately the “smart” thing to do. This is because the “Dogecoin Millionaire” nickname served as a platform to become a crypto influencer.

He now has 115,000 YouTube subscribers and over 350,000 Twitter followers, an audience that he didn’t have before this saga. In a documentary that followed his journey called “This is Not Financial Advice,” he claimed to have made $690,000 in sponsorship deals by its June 2023 release date. He had also moved into a better home in Las Vegas. 

“That was my goal initially anyway, because I felt like I could create a name brand from the entire thing,” Contessoto explained. “I was doing YouTube videos every single day. I was doing advertisements for products, I was doing commercials, I was selling merchandise [...] I was just basically monetizing the entire journey.”

But this too hasn’t come without its downsides. Many Crypto Twitter influencers take payments from projects in exchange for social media promotion—a move that has landed Contessoto in the crosshairs of crypto detectives. 

Noted on-chain sleuth ZachXBT has highlighted some of the Dogecoin Millionaire’s previous promotions of alleged “rug pulls.” This includes Safereum, a token that plummeted nearly 95% as the team behind the project dumped 600 ETH on the holders. Security firm CertiK defined this as an “exit scam.” Contessoto deflected blame for his role in promoting projects that go awry.

“ZachXBT always talks about, ‘You need to do your due diligence before you work with these projects,’” Contessoto explained. “I'll do as much research as I can possibly do. But I'm not some detective, sleuth, tech guy. What am I going to do? Sit there for hours and hours, try to make sure it's legit, and then something ends up happening anyway?”

Such influencer-driven token scams remain common. In October, a Solana meme coin called Sharpei soared to a market cap of $54 million in under an hour thanks to promotion from prominent crypto influencers; Contessoto was not among them.

Soon after, the token dramatically collapsed in price in a matter of seconds as insiders collectively cashed out amid controversy. Part of this scheme included a pitch deck that named big projects and influencers as official partners, which helped onboard others who promoted the “rug pull.”

When considering projects to promote, Contessoto claims to check if a token’s liquidity is locked, examine the tokenomics of a project and the token supply, research the people behind the coin, and ask other people in the space to vouch for them. But ultimately, he said, influencers can be fooled just like regular traders. 

“As long as you’re not pumping and dumping, I’ve never once called a project and then two seconds later dumped my whole bag,” he said. “I have a good conscience on me. I work with projects I think are legitimate, and I try to maneuver through this space as best as I can.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward