Glauber Contessoto, a New Yorker who found fame by investing his life savings in Dogecoin and becoming a millionaire, is making news headlines again after losing his millionaire status.

Things went south for Contessoto after this week’s selloff in the cryptocurrency market.

Contessoto told CNBC that while he is not currently a dogecoin millionaire anymore on paper, he plans to “hodl” the currency for more than a year.

“Whatever happens in the short-term doesn’t matter to me because I’m looking to ‘hodl’ dogecoin for years to come. I’m truly not worried at the end of the day,” Contessoto said, adding that he would have been worried if bitcoin and ethereum were not hit in the crash.

Glauber said he invested more than $250,000 in dogecoin on Feb. 5 believing he’d become a millionaire. He said he learned about the meme cryptocurrency on Reddit and bought in when it was worth about 4.5 cents. 

On April 15, the 33-year-old became a dogecoin millionaire. “I was up all night staring at my screen,” Contessoto told CNBC.

Why dogecoin?

Glauber said he was attracted to the joke meme coin because he loved the Reddit community that supported it. He saw that its base had grown since dogecoin was created as a joke in 2013, and he liked that it was inspired by the Shiba Inu “Doge” meme. He also likes Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has repeatedly tweet-pumped dogecoin and bitcoin, helping raise their price in the process.

“I think the guy is a genius,” Contessoto said.

The price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fell on Monday after China’s central bank intensified its ban on banks and financial institutions from crypto transactions and from dealing in crypto-related services. Dogecoin was trading as low as $0.16 on Monday, down from an all-time high of $0.73 in May. The cryptocurrency market is showing signs of a slight recovery with dogecoin trading at $0.24 as of this writing.

Dogecoin was launched in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a “fun” alternative to bitcoin. It gained a buzz online and grew from there. Like many cryptocurrencies, it is prone to explosive price swings

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The price of a dogecoin spiked more than 34 percent on May 14 after Musk tweeted that he was “working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency” and that the work was “potentially promising.”

Ross Nicholl, one of four part-time Doge developers, told crypto website Decrypt that the team has worked with Elon Musk for some time. “Given that Dogecoin hasn’t had full-time developers since the coin’s founders pulled out of the project in 2015, the announcement may have surprised a lot of people,” Motley Fool reported.

Dogecoin is now the six-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $31.3 billion, according to Coinbase. It rose more than 1,500 percent since the beginning of 2021 with Musk’s help. At one point in May, dogecoin had a $79 billion market cap — bigger than 80 percent of the companies on the S&P 500.