It seems Elon Musk has been moving the crypto market at his whims as of now. A day after Tesla announced that it is dropping Bitcoin (BTC) payments citing environmental concerns, Musk is now driving the attention of his followers to Dogecoin (DOGE).
On late Thursday, May 13, Elon Musk tweeted that he (and probably Tesla) is working with Dogecoin developers to improve the system’s transaction efficiency.
Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2021
This was enough for the DOGE price to shoot 12% in this falling market making its way to $50. However, it seems the selling pressure is still high. At press time, DOGE is trading at a price of $0.47 with a market cap of $61.6 billion.
Musk’s affinity towards the joke and meme cryptocurrency is somewhat surprising! As we at CoinGape rightly predicted, Tesla’s intention looks quite strong enough to move towards Dogecoin (DOGE). Well, fair enough but then why fire shots at Bitcoin (BTC), especially when they still continue holding it! There’s some explanation for Tesla to do here.
On the other hand, Elon Musk has been busy defending Tesla’s decision to suspend Bitcoin. Yesterday, Musk shared a graph of Bitcoin’s energy consumption calling it “Insane”. In the following tweets, Musk notes:
“It is high time there was a carbon tax! To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can’t drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal.”
Well, I am surprised that the world’s top-ten company and billionaire Elon Musk didn’t know about it when dabbling first into Bitcoin payments and instead of having a sudden change of heart.
Making Way for Dogecoin (DOGE)
During Wednesday’s announcement, Tesla also made its intention clear that it is open to considering other cryptocurrencies that have <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.
Just a day before that, Elon Musk had conducted a Twitter poll asking his followers whether they would like to see Tesla accepting Dogecoin (DOGE) payments.
Do you want Tesla to accept Doge?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2021
Joining the dots it is pretty clear that the Bitcoin-drop exercise could possibly be a move to make way for Dogecoin. Knowing Elon Musk’s brand value and his impact, the trend of #Doge4Tesla has already begun. Certainly, Musk has managed to move the market big time.
After Tesla’s announcement, Bitcoin crashed all the way to under $50,000 creating a ripple effect across the crypto market. Tesla’s Bitcoin-dropping decision eroded over $300 billion from the overall crypto space.
