​​Dogecoin Soaring After Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Sell Merch for DOGE

Dogecoin, the original meme crypto is witnessing a substantial pump after tech billionaire and crypto enthusiast Elon Musk announced Tesla would be testing out DOGE for selling merchandise.

Musk, who was just named Time’s “Man of the year”, made the announcement via Twitter.

Immediately, DOGE did a 40% rally, peaking out at $0.21 before cooling off.

Speaking in an interview with Time, Musk promoted Dogecoin as a better form of payment than Bitcoin

“Bitcoin is an interesting example, obviously the prime mover on this. But the transaction volume of Bitcoin is low, and the cost per transaction is high. It is, at least at its base level, suitable for maybe a store of value.”

Musk said Bitcoin “is not a good substitute for a transactional currency,” adding that while it may have been created as a joke, “Dogecoin is better suited for transactions.”

“The total transaction flow you can do with Dogecoin, like transactions per day, has much higher potential than Bitcoin.

It is slightly inflationary, but that inflation number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage, so that means over time its percentage of inflation decreases, and that’s actually good because it encourages people to spend rather than to sort of horde it as a store of value.”

Image via Shutterstock 

Out of all the disruptive, cutting edge technology in the crypto industry, many have been puzzled as to why Musk insists on throwing his weight behind DOGE. Regardless, crypto traders still hang on to every word Musk says, allowing him to trigger parabolic rallies in various tokens all the time.

In early October, Musk sparked a 200% rally in Shiba Inu (SHIB) simply for tweeting a photo of his puppy. Before that, the billionaire was largely credited with bringing Dogecoin into the mainstream. He once triggered an 863% rally in DOGE for tweeting a meme.

DOGE is up roughly 5,720% over the last year, and is the 10th biggest cryptocurrency by market capl jostling to steal the ninth spot from interoperable blockchain Polkadot (DOT).