Dogecoin is on a rip, and, once again, it’s thanks to Elon Musk.
On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Twitter is finally preparing to offer payment tools, long a priority for Musk at Twitter. Although payments on the platform likely will focus on fiat currency, like U.S. dollars, Musk said he wants the system built so crypto functionality could be added later, according to the FT.
As of Tuesday morning, the news had propelled Dogecoin up 8.2% over the past 24 hours to as high as 0.094 cents, a level not reached since December, according to CoinMarketCap. The cryptocurrency outperformed leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which was trading down 0.2% at about $23,000. The second-most popular crypto, Ether, was up 0.3% to around $1,500.
Musk, the self-proclaimed Dogefather, has been a fan of the meme coin for years, and his tweets often push the price of the token up or down. In the past couple of years he has also accepted the crypto as payment on some occasions at SpaceX and Tesla.
Before the Tesla CEO bought Twitter in October, he had proposed several changes to Twitter Blue, Twitter’s subscription service, and suggested that maybe users would be able to pay for it with Dogecoin.
Enthusiasm from the crypto crowd had faded earlier this month when some speculated that Twitter would be using Stripe for payments.
But Dogecoin has been known to jump dramatically in value before quickly falling. The cryptocurrency started as a meme in 2013, but was quickly adopted by crypto superfans.
In contrast to Bitcoin, which has about 19 million tokens in circulation, Dogecoin has 132 billion, with no limit on how many can be created.
Still, some pointed out on Twitter that a tremendous sum of money has been poured into the cryptocurrency. Its market cap of $12.3 billion surpasses that of American Airlines by a couple billion, one user pointed out.
