Goldman Sachs banker 'quits after making millions from Dogecoin'

A London-based Goldman Sachs director has quit after reportedly making millions from investing in Dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency that has increased its price by some 10,000pc this year.

Aziz McMahon, head of emerging market sales at the US investment bank, resigned after benefiting from the joke digital currency’s meteoric growth this year surpassing that of any other cryptocurrency.

City sources claimed Mr McMahon was opening a hedge fund with his cash, according to efinancialcareers, which first reported on his departure. It is unclear how much money Mr Aziz, who had been with the bank for 14 years, had made.

Dogecoin has become a “favourite” digital asset of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who refers to himself as the “Dogefather”. Mr Musk inadvertently sent the price of the coin on a 30pc nosedive over the weekend when he appeared on prime time American television show Saturday Night Live and joked that the coin was just a “hustle”.

Previously, Mr Musk’s Twitter posts have been a major driver of interest in the cryptocurrency.

According to CoinDesk, a cryptocurrency price tracker, Dogecoin’s market capitalisation is $65.8bn, bigger than Ford, Heinz and Twitter. Its price has risen from $0.0054 at the start of the year to $0.515 on Tuesday.

Created in 2013 by former Adobe and IBM software engineers, Dogecoin is a reference to a popular internet meme featuring the Shiba Inu dog breed.

Its market value is much smaller than Bitcoin, which has a total value of $1.06 trillion. There is no limit on the number of Dogecoins that can be mined.

Records show that an anonymous person or entity controls around 28pc of all the Dogecoin in circulation, a stake worth more than $2bn. The opacity of cryptocurrency means it is difficult to decipher its owners.