Tesla Accepting Dogecoin Payments

Elon Musk’s tweet

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, continues to keep Dogecoin (DOGE) relevant through his latest announcement. On Friday, January 14, Musk tweeted “Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin”. Following his tweet, DOGE saw a 10% increase in price. Only select items are available for purchase with DOGE, like the Giga Texas Belt Buckle or the Cyberwhistle. This isn’t his first time tweeting about the meme coin; he has announced SpaceX missions to be funded entirely by DOGE. He even has a pet Shiba Inu named Floki, which caused a stir on Twitter, and responded to a tweet about how he could be the world’s first trillionaire by saying “*In Dogecoin”. It has become increasingly apparent that Musk intends to keep DOGE around, and his tweets often have a major effect on the price of the meme coin.

History of DOGE

In 2013, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer co-created Dogecoin as a joke. The name comes from a popular meme about a Shiba Inu dog. The initial purpose of Dogecoin was to make fun of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at the time, but the project quickly took off. Reddit and similar websites created an active community for the coin, which runs on a proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

Starting in 2017, DOGE reached a market cap over $100 million, which continued to steadily rise. Following a TikTok trend in 2020, the meme coin soared in price. Many began to take the coin very seriously, trying to get the coin to $1 in price by spreading information about it over social media. Soon celebrities like Musk and Snoop Dogg were tweeting about the coin, causing it to gain more traction and for the price to inflate. In early 2021, the price was less than one cent, but soon it was trading at more than 10 cents, showing no signs of stopping. DOGE saw its peak, over 70 cents, right before Elon Musk went on Saturday Night Live, where he did an entire segment on the coin. After his appearance, the price of DOGE dropped over 40 percent, and since then has continually dropped and now sits below 20 cents.

What’s next for Dogecoin?

Since the mainstream popularity of DOGE, lots of other “dog coins” have been created. Some of these projects, like Shiba Inu (SHIB), have seen great success. SHIB saw a surge in price over 20,000% in less than a year, and now sits at the 14th highest market cap in crypto. With continued backing from Elon Musk, it seems DOGE has a future. However, there are better crypto projects out there, that weren’t made as jokes, run on better consensus mechanisms, and have better, more intricate networks. It’s so hard to predict the future of such a volatile asset, especially one that has seen lots of support from the worlds wealthiest man.

It is unfortunate that there’s this “get rich quick” idea that is in so much of the crypto community. DOGE and SHIB cemented that idea into people’s heads. Now a lot of the media attention is taken away from more legitimate projects with a better use case, and is instead focused on the gains people are making from meme coins, instead of the legitimately useful projects that are trying to change lives for the better.