On December 14, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk stated on Tuesday that the electric car company will on a test basis accept Dogecoin as a means of payment for the merchandise.
Not too long ago, Elon musk was named Time’s magazine person of the year. He stated that DOGE is more suitable and eco-friendly for transactions. Elon musk made this announcement via his Twitter handle. In a tweet on Tuesday morning, Musk wrote “Tesla will make some merch buyable with doge & see how it goes”
This announcement, as one would expect, blew the prices of DOGE skyhigh. The price of Dogecoin popped from $0.1699 at the time of Musk’s tweet to $0.2183 in just over one hour after the tweet based on data collected.
According to data collected from Coinbase, Musk tweets on DODGE including the tweet where he referred to DOGE as the “people’s crypto”, has helped the coin soar 5,5859% over the last year.
Musk has previously indicated that Tesla will soon accept Dogecoin. In May, he organized a poll on Twitter asking his followers if Tesla should accept DOGE or not. 78.2% said yes greatly overshadowing the negatives. In August, he agreed with the owner of NBA team Dallas Mavericks, that “the community for doge is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange”.
Tesla Still Not Accepting Bitcoin(BTC)
Throwback to the past couple of months, specifically May, Elon musk revealed that Tesla Inc. will no longer be accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for merchandise.
Tesla has still not resumed accepting Bitcoin due to environmental concerns involved in the process of Mining Bitcoin. Musk claimed that the amount of energy consumed in mining Bitcoin was a bit excessive.
Musk later revealed that the electric car company will resume acceptance of Bitcoin “when there’s reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by BTC miners. This doesn’t seem possible in the nearest future because more and more energy is being channeled into mining more BTC.
Although, Tesla still possesses Bitcoin on its balance sheet worth over $1.6 billion at the end of the third quarter. The company however does not own any Dodge but instead just used it as a test run for payment of merchandise.
Musk however has clearly stated that he personally owns Bitcoin, Ethereum and Doge.
Impact of Tesla’s Implementation of DOGE
According to Chris Kline, the co-founder of Bitcoin, ” Elon Musk has been a great advocate for the crypto community for many years. His latest announcement will usher in a new era of commerce and trailblaze a path for altcoins to expand their use case”.
However, Musk did not clearly specify which of the merchandise would be accepting DODGE. The prices of the merchandise range from $50 and go as high as $1,900.
Tesla has a wide range of products like Giga Texas belt, buckles, and mini-models of it’s vehicles as well as some pretty clanky limited edition things like “the Cyberwhistle” modeled after the much anticipated Cybertruck. Tesla also recently launched “the Cyberquad” for kids which is also modeled after the Cyber truck.
