A tweet by Elon Musk triggered a sharp rally in the price of Dogecoin.

“Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” tweeted Elon Musk today, lighting a fire underneath the hitherto somnolent DOGE cryptocurrency.

The comment led to an initial spike of over 25% (over 24 hours) in the price of DOGE. At the time of writing, it is trading at 0.1928, still up over 20%. (CryptoNews)

After Musk backtracked on accepting bitcoin (BTC) in payment for cars sold by Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), on grounds of the environmentally unhealthy carbon footprint from the crypto’s mining, DOGE is the sole crypto now usable for payments to Tesla.

Recall that in an interview after he was named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year, Musk extolled the virtues of DOGE in comparison with BTC.

“Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow that you do with Dogecoin, like transactions per day, is much higher potential than Bitcoin,” Musk said.

He also observed that while BTC served well as a store of value, it was inadequate in its transactional functionality.

On the other hand, DOGE encouraged people to spend it, instead of holding, because it had a slightly inflationary tendency.

Elon Musk has been a long-standing proponent of DOGE on social media, catapulting it to the ranks of the top-performing cryptos in 2021.

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