Tesla to accept new crypto as payment
Elon Musk has tweeted that his electric car company Tesla will accept the cryptocurrency dogecoin as payment, but only for some of its merchandise. The announcement sent the price of the Shiba Inu meme-inspired token surging.
“Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday.
Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2021
A day earlier, Musk pitched dogecoin as “better suited for transactions” than bitcoin in an interview with Time magazine.
“Fundamentally, bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. Even though it was created as a silly joke, dogecoin is better suited for transactions,” he said in his interview as Time’s 2021 Person of the Year.
The crypto market reacted swiftly to the news, with the price of bitcoin taking a dive and dogecoin surging 33% on Monday. The upward trend in the meme token prices continued through Tuesday, with dogecoin trading at $0.205 at 13:00 GMT, up another 24%.
This is not the first time Musk has showed support for dogecoin development and adoption, nor is it the first time his tweets have made an impact on the crypto market. One of his followers even tweeted in response, “Your capacity to manipulate the market through Twitter is peak hyper capitalism” that “will be studied in university courses one day.”
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