DOGE Spikes 27% on Elon Musk Tweet
Tesla chief says the company will accept Dogecoin payments for merchandise “and see how it goes”
Blockworks exclusive art by Axel Rangel
key takeaways
- Musk was named TIME’s Person of the Year on Monday and said that Dogecoin is “better suited for transactions [than bitcoin]”
- An early Tuesday morning tweet sent DOGE prices rocketing higher within a few minutes
Elon Musk is once again moving markets with a fresh round of pro-Dogecoin comments proliferating on Twitter.
TIME Magazine announced its 2021 Person of the Year award for Musk, on Monday. The consequent social media blitz included a Tweet featuring the celebrity CEO discussing cryptocurrency in the context of his expertise on money, stemming from his involvement in the early days of digital payments service PayPal. As he has done before, Musk used the opportunity to criticize bitcoin as a currency and promote his favorite crypto hobbyhorse, Dogecoin.
“Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions,” Musk said, arguing that Dogecoin supports a higher number of transactions per day. And while it is inflationary in its issuance, he added, “that’s actually good because it encourages people to spend rather than sort of hoard it as a store of value.”
But what can folks buy with their DOGE? Well, Musk provided one answer for that in a Tuesday morning tweet to his 65 million followers:
The market did not wait for details before buying up DOGE like a Model 3 sedan. In the six minutes following Musk’s tweet, the uber-memecoin rocketed 27%, a pace indicative of twitter-watching bots taking full advantage.
DOGE/USD on the 1-minute timeframe. Musk’s tweet came at 10:34 UTC.
The price of DOGE has remained elevated in the hour since, holding above 20 cents.
Musk’s outlook on bitcoin follows the store-of-value narrative that has predominated of late, notwithstanding the growth in Bitcoin’s Lightning network.
“I could really sort of wax on about the nature of money for hours…there are very few people that understand it better than me. Bitcoin is an interesting example — obviously the prime mover on this — but the transaction volume on bitcoin is low and the cost per transaction is high. It is, at least at its base level, suitable for a store of value, but fundamentally bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency,” Musk told TIME.
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