Elon Musk says Tesla will start accepting dogecoin, sending shares in the cryptocurrency soaring by as much as 33 per cent.
“Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” Musk tweeted following a poll in which 78 per cent of his followers said he should.The currency originally started out as a joke in 2013 but now has an impressive market cap of $US39 billion .
Musk did not say which merchandise would be included but Tesla sells clothes and mini models of its vehicles.This isn’t Tesla’s first foray into cryptocurrency. It bought $US1.5 billion bitcoin in January, and by March said it would start accepting the currency for car purchases. But then Musk backtracked in May saying bitcoin’s energy consumption was “insane” and that Tesla would no longer accept purchases using the currency.Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are ‘mined’ using intensive computing power which leaves a large carbon footprint.
He has since focused his attention on dogecoin, even working with developers to improve its efficiency.Doegcoin has struggled in recent weeks, with its spin-off, shiba inu, briefly overtaking it on the crypto leaderboard. Shiba inu now sits slightly under dogecoin, with a market cap of $US34 billion.
In 2013, US software engineer Billy Markus and Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer created dogecoin. They used a Japanese dog, a shiba inu, as a mascot for their coin.However, in August 2020, an anonymous person who called themselves “Ryoshi” created a spin-off of dogecoin, called shiba inu or SHIB after the mascot.Musk’s power to pump up cryptocurrency has earned him the nicknames “crypto king” and “dogefather”.
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