Dogecoin jumps 10% on word you can use it to buy Tesla merch
So far you can buy a whistle, belt buckle and a kid’s four-wheeler, but not a car.
The price of Dogecoin (DOGE) jumped 10% on Friday before shedding some of its gains after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the company is now accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for some merchandise.
Early Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the electric carmaker’s merchandise can be purchased with Dogecoin.
Doge reached $0.207468 immediately following Musk’s tweet before shedding some of those gains, according to Coindesk data. It was down around 0.41% at .188088 at 1:49 ET but still up more than 15% over the last 24 hours.
What you can buy
So far, you can only purchase a few items with Dogecoin, and they’re nonrefundable.
A whistle shaped like Tesla’s Cybertruck costs 300 Doge, equivalent to about $57 at the time of writing. A belt buckle commemorating the construction of Tesla’s newest gigafactory in Texas costs 835 Doge, which is about $158. A lithium-ion battery-powered kid’s quad inspired by Tesla’s Cybertruck was going for 12,020 Doge, equivalent to about $2,274. The quad and whistle were sold out at the time of writing.
This leads us to the question, will Tesla ever accept Doge as payment for its cars?
The base price for a Model 3 is $40,690, which would cost about 214,546 Doge at its current price.
While there are no known plans to expand the acceptance of Doge to its cars, customers can already buy a Tesla with Bitcoin. In March 2021, Musk announced that Tesla had begun accepting the top cryptocurrency as payment.
What is Dogecoin?
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. The name and Shiba Inu logo are based on a meme. Though Doge was created as a joke, it’s now one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Musk has been an avid supporter of Dogecoin for a while, and his tweets often move the price of the cryptocurrency.
Musk tweets, money moves
Musk’s tweets have the power to move markets.
In December, a tweet by Musk announcing Tesla’s plans to start accepting Doge for some of its merchandise sent Doge soaring 38%.
Last year around this time, Musk exclaimed his love for the online marketplace Etsy, sending the company’s stock 8% higher.
Musk’s tweeting also contributed to Gamestop’s meteoric rise early last year. Musk tweeted nothing more than “Gamestonk!!” eight minutes after the market closed on January 26, 2021, and the stock opened 140% higher at $354.83.
Will Tesla’s acceptance of Dogecoin turn things around for the altcoin?
Doge soared more than 9,800% to an all-time high of $0.740796 in May 2021 but has since slipped 75% from its peak.
But more than 1,900 merchants now accept Doge as payment, according to Cryptwerk.
There is a lot of positivity within the Doge community concerning the coin going forward. Some say the coin could reach $1, which would give it a market cap of around $132 billion.
For now, Doge seems to remain a volatile investment and will likely continue to mimic Bitcoin’s (BTC) performance, much like the broader cryptocurrency market.
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