Elon Musk has stated that Tesla will allow customers to purchase some of its products using the dogecoin meme cryptocurrency.
Musk tweeted Tuesday, “Tesla will make some merchandise buyable with Doge and see how it goes.”
Prior to Musk’s revelation, the price of Dogecoin was declining, but it immediately soared by as much as 30%. According to the cryptocurrency statistics website Coinmarketcap, it was recently up 26% at $0.2092.
The Tesla CEO has long been a backer of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a Japanese Shiba Inu dog that was created as a joke in 2013.
In 2021, Musk and Tesla were important drivers of the cryptocurrency boom. In January, the electric-car manufacturer purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin, and in March, it announced that it will begin accepting bitcoin as payment for cars.
Musk, on the other hand, rebuked that notion in May, calling bitcoin’s energy consumption “crazy.” Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as dogecoin, are safeguarded and “mined” with a large amount of computational power.
Musk, who was selected TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2021, told TIME on Monday that dogecoin is a superior transactional currency to bitcoin.
“[Bitcoin] has a low transaction volume and a high cost per transaction,” Musk remarked. “Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional cash at its core.”
Musk did not clarify what products, with costs ranging from $50 to $1,900, might be purchased with dogecoin.
Musk, who has more than 66 million Twitter followers, has been heavily involved in this year’s retail trading craze, tweeting about cryptocurrencies and helping to drive up their prices.
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