Dogecoin Set To Break New Grounds As Elon Musk Announces Tesla Will Accept DOGE For Merchandise

• Elon Musk says Tesla will try out accepting Dogecoin (DOGE) for its merchandise.
• The announcement has made the price of DOGE shoot up by around 20% in the last hour. 
• Dogecoin seems to have been in Tesla’s plans for some time now. 

Elon Musk has once again sent a jolt through the cryptocurrency market. The billionaire announced that Tesla will accept Dogecoin as a medium of payment for its merchandise on an experimental basis.

The news seems to be just the kind of boost the price of DOGE, which has been sluggish recently, has needed. In the past hour since his tweet, the price of DOGE has surged around 20%. DOGE is now trading at $0.19, posting a 15.7% increase in the last 24 hours, and seems poised to go even higher on the day. The joke coin is however still around 11.4% down in the 14 days time frame. 

The new announcement from the world’s richest man is coming just after he reiterated the reason for his preference of Dogecoin as a transactional currency over the pioneer cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Musk stated that Dogecoin’s transactions per second and transactions per day held more potential than that of Bitcoin in an interview given to Time Magazine as part of the events marking his being awarded the Person of the Year for 2021.  

The announcement is also likely confirmation of what the community has been speculating to be in the works since last month. Rumors emerged last month that the Electric Vehicle maker was planning to allow Dogecoin payment. Inspection of Tesla’s source code showed the option to “Order in SHIBA” included in the choices for completing payments. Twitter users inferred that the option may be linked to DOGE at the time as Musk has stated that the only meme coin he supports still remains Dogecoin. 

On further inspection by a Twitter user, “Tree_of_Alpha,” the code was revealed to redirect to a “processing” payments page when he attempted to pay with DOGE but did not when attempted with SHIB.  

While the leaked code also includes a “Pay with Bitcoin” option, Elon has not elaborated on when they will roll out the feature. However, Tesla still has plans to resume accepting Bitcoin as they stated in their 3rd quarter report. 

Whether Tesla’s latest announcement will be the catalyst needed for DOGE to reach the much talked about $1 dollar price remains to be seen. But by all indications, it is bound to have a very positive effect on price.