Dogecoin jumps after Musk tweets Tesla merchandise 'buyable' with the token

Meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin jumped on Friday after Tesla chief Elon Musk said the electric carmaker will accept it as payment for merchandise.

“Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin,” Musk tweeted.

Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2022

His mid-December tweet saying such use of dogecoin will be allowed on a test basis sent the cryptocurrency up more than 20%.

Dogecoin, popular among retail investors, raced up 18% to above $0.2 after Friday’s tweet.

Musk’s tweets on the cryptocurrency, including the one where he called it the “people’s crypto”, buoyed the meme coin and caused it to soar roughly 4,000% in 2021.

What is Dogecoin?

According to CNBC, the digital token was created in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a faster but “fun” alternative to Bitcoin. It was started as a satire on the numerous fraud crypto coins that had sprung up at the time, and takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was viral several years ago.

Unlike Bitcoins, whose maximum possible number is fixed at 21 million (a figure that is estimated to be reached by 2040), Dogecoin numbers do not have an upper limit, and there are already more than 100 billion in existence.

When the crypto coin first took off, the online community that was backing it invited attention by supporting unconventional causes, such as sponsoring Jamaica’s bobsled team at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Also that year, the Dogecoin community gave $55,000 worth of the digital token to a Nascar driver in the US.