Elon Musk pumps Dogecoin with yet another tweet, token surges 25%

New Delhi: Elon Musk's favourite Dogecoin has zoomed as much as 25 per cent in the last 24 hours, after a tweet from the electric-car maker's boss, which says the company is accepting digital currency Dogecoin to buy Tesla's merchandise.

The self-proclaimed Dogefather's tweet sent the original meme token to fly higher to $0.2029 on Friday from $0.1623.



Sharat Chandra, VP- Research & Strategy, EarthID, a self-sovereign Identity Management Platform, said that Tesla enabled its back-end to allow Dogecoin payments merchandise such as Cybersquad and Giga Texas Belt Buckle.

"People are more open to using cryptos for payments. Visa’s recent survey demonstrated that small business owners across nine geographies are willing to accept digital currencies as payment methods," he added.

Tesla doesn’t accept Dogecoin for electric cars, but one can technically buy an electric vehicle with the largest meme coin. Tesla's Cyberquad, a $1,900 quad bike designed for children, can be purchased with the meme token.

In its FAQ section, Tesla highlights that it doesn't accept other cryptocurrencies apart from Dogecoin. The release of version 1.14.5 of Dogecoin Core dramatically reduced fees for all network participants.

Since its inception in 2014, Dogecoin has delivered a return of about 45,000 per cent to investors. However, it is trading about 35 per cent below its all-time peak.

Following the push from Musk, Dogecoin briefly entered the top 10 digital tokens in terms of market cap. However, profit-booking pushed the token to the 11th spot, behind Polkadot.

Both Dogecoin and Polkadot were in cut-throat competition as both the tokens were commanding a market cap little over $26.3 billion, the data from Coinmarketcap suggested.

The total traded volume of Dogecoin zoomed about 200 per cent as tokens were more than $4.39 billion exchanged hands in the last 24 hours. There are 132.67B Doge tokens in supply.

"It is considered a serious investment option by a lot of investors and has been supported by top figures like Elon Musk," said Abhayanand Singh, Co-founder & CEO, of Vistas Media Capital.

"The extreme volatility observed in Dogecoin has day traders benefit from investing in it," Singh added. "The joke coin now seems very serious and has ranked in the top 10 cryptocurrencies on several charts."

Dogecoin is based on the popular 'Doge' Internet meme and features a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed dog, on its logo. Dogecoin differs from Bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol in several ways, one of which is by using Scrypt technology. The e-car giant dabbled in Bitcoin payments in May 2021 but later dropped them due to environmental concerns. Yet, the Musk-helmed company holds the largest cryptocurrency on its balance sheet.