A five-word tweet by billionaire Elon Musk led to a mcryptocurrencyassive jump in the value of meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin. Musk said on Friday that Tesla Inc merchandise can be bought using the dogecoin. One unit of dogecoin was trading at $0.1981 at the time of writing this report. The value had jumped by over 26 per cent.
“Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin,” the electric-car maker’s Chief Executive Officer said in a tweet.
In no time, #dogecoin shot to the list of top trending hashtags on Twitter.
Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2022
Elon Musk is known for influencing the value of dogecoin through his remarks on social media. His tweets on the in the past, including the one where he called it the "people's crypto", have helped the meme coin soar 5,859 per cent over 2021, according to data from Coinbase website.
Musk, who was named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2021, had in October, reiterated his holdings which are limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin. He closely watches the cryptocurrency space and tweets his observations regularly.
In an interview with Time, the Tesla and SpaceX chief said when it comes to transactions per day, Dogecoin is a better currency.
“The transaction value of Bitcoin is low and the cost per transaction is high. At least at a space level, it is suitable as a store of value. But fundamentally, Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency,” Elon Musk told the magazine.
“Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow that you do with Dogecoin is… transactions per day has much higher potential than Bitcoin.”
The entrepreneur, who overtook Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this year to become the world's wealthiest person, said while dogecoin could be inflationary, at least it is a fixed number as opposed to Bitcoin. “And that’s actually good because it encourages people to spend, rather than sort of hoard as a store of value,” he said.
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