Tech billionaire Elon Musk has sent Dogecoin (DOGE) on a ride after announcing that Tesla will start accepting DOGE as payment for select items.
In a tweet to his 66.4 million followers, Musk says that Tesla will test out DOGE payments on some of its merchandise.
Immediately following Musk’s statement, Dogecoin spiked from $0.15 to $0.21, a 40% increase in less than two hours. The memecoin has since leveled out, currently trading at $0.19, a 20% increase from 24 hours ago.
The announcement comes on the heels of Time Magazine naming the SpaceX CEO its 2021 Person of the Year.
In an interview with Time, Musk says that he believes DOGE has an advantage over Bitcoin when it comes to being a form of payment.
“Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency.
And even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions…”
When asked why he thinks DOGE is better than BTC for transactions, Musk said,
“The total transaction flow that you can do with Dogecoin is substantially more than… like transactions per day [on Dogecoin] is much higher than, has much higher potential than Bitcoin.
[Dogecoin] is slightly inflationary, but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage.
So that means, over time, its percentage inflation actually decreases.
And that’s actually good because it encourages people to spend rather than hoard it as a store of value.”
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Krzysztof Bubel